earnest and efficient defenders of the pope and the church among the people. Bismarck's third step was, therefore, to silence the Jesuits and kindred religious orders, that is, missionary and teaching orders and congregations, to suppress their houses, and to banish them from the empire. This Review has not ever been noted for its devotion or subserviency to the Society of Jesus, and at times it has been even hostile to them, probably very much for the reason that the Athenian wished to ostracize Aristides; that is, because he was "tired of hearing him called the Just." The injudicious praise of them by their friends, as if they were the only true Catholics in the church, was little fitted to exalt them in the estimation of a man of our taste and temperament. The society is not absolutely free from imperfection; but the Review was wrong, and opposed them for things for which it should have commended and defended them. The estimate in which the society should be held by the loyal Catholic is easily determined by the fact, that, whenever any one would strike a blow at the heart of the church, he begins, whether a private or public person, by attacking the Jesuits, feeling instinctively that he must get them out of his way before he can render his blow effective. When an attack is to be made on religion, they are the first to repel it. Their simplicity and deficient worldly wisdom leave them sometimes to be imposed upon by the cunning and designing, but their Catholic instincts may always be implicitly trusted. Bismarck knows it, and therefore makes them his first victims. For the same reason he attacks all missionary and teaching orders. He knows that, if they have the ears of the people-and have them they will wherever they go-and the charge of the schools, and the training of children and youth, it is idle to dream of detaching the people, to any great extent, from the church, or of her destruction. What can Döllinger and his seventy apostate and excommunicated priests, even if recognized and sustained as Catholics by the civil power, do against the science, virtue, devotion to the Holy See, of a half a dozen Jesuits, Redemptorists, Lazarists, or even Sisters of Charity? It was absolutely necessary, if Bismarck would overthrow the papacy and destroy the church, to begin by making away with the Jesuits and other living religious orders and congregations. An obedient and servile Reichsrath carries out his wish in the empire, and a submissive Italian parliament meekly receives and executes his orders to the same effect,

in the newly stolen States of the Church: and all in the name of liberty of conscience and modern civilization.

Bismarck is no fool in his generation, and sees as clearly as any Catholic does or can, that, if children are trained to believe in God and in the obligation to know, reverence, and obey the divine law, as taught, declared, and applied by the church governed and taught by the infallible vicar of Christ, it is in vain that statesmen labor to emancipate conscience from the law of God, and to bring the people to reject in the interior of their souls the entire moral order, and cast off without compunction all authority but that of secular government based on might or force alone. So, as his fourth step, for which he is sure, in advance, of the applause of all the sectarians and seculars of both the Old World and the New, he prohibits priests from being school inspectors, and does whatever lies in his power to exclude the Catholic religion from schools designed especially for Catholics, and to prevent Catholic parents from bringing up their children in their own religion. How destroy the church and secularize the entire Catholic community, if you permit Catholicity to be taught in schools? Bismarck's Protestant brethren and infidel admirers in this country understand this as well as he does, and therefore turn a deaf ear to the protests of Catholics against the injustice of taxing them to support schools to which they cannot, with a good conscience, send their children. And why should they not? Are they not of the modern world which excludes justice, or measures it by utility? Do they not follow the spirit of the age, which Mr. Henry Ward Beecher's Christian Union takes as the manifestation of the divine will, and ridicules the Holy Father because he refuses to yield to it, but steadily resists it, as our Lord and his apostles did the spirit of their age and nation?

Still this is not enough: Bismarck has taken a fifth step. This last step, taken, as our liberal journals assure us, in behalf of civil and religious liberty, is to place the discipline of the church, in regard to her own members, under the supervision and control of the civil authority. It prohibits the church from excommunicating or interdicting a priest guilty of heresy, or of any other ecclesiastical or moral offence, without the consent of the government. The principle asserted here, if carried out, destroys at once the freedom and independence of the church, and results in her total destruction in the German empire. It takes away her

authority to govern her own members in purely theological and ecclesiastical matters according to her own laws, and deprives her of all power to purge her own body of unworthy members, or to maintain purity of doctrine or discipline. At one blow it sweeps away all the laws of the church for the government of the faithful, and subjects the church absolutely to the imperial or national authority. She can exist only by the total loss of her unity and catholicity, and by being turned into a national establishment like the church of England, which must be distinguished from the church in England. This, with the overthrow of the papacy, would be the complete destruction of the Catholic Church, which is the point aimed at.

Now, if we look at these several steps or measures, we shall see they are devised with consummate skill; and taking Bismarck's point of view, that the papal church is a human institution and under purely human control, it is difficult to conceive why they should not prove efficient in the hands of such a leader as Bismarck, and be successful, as Dr. Littlejohn thinks and hopes they will be, in overthrowing the papacy. How can it be otherwise? Bismarck controls Germany, and Germany has prostrated Austria, holds her foot on the neck of France, and dictates the policy of Italy, who holds the pope a prisoner for Bismarck, and is ready at his order to close all communication between the pope and the faithful; Russia is schismatical, and will not interpose in behalf of the pope, nor will England; America cannot, and would not if she could, for she upholds Bismarck with all her sympathies, and earnestly wishes for his success. And why should he not succeed, with all the odds, humanly speaking, in his favor?

Suppose, now, that he succeeds, and the church is swept away, and there are no more popes, bishops, or priests: what is to follow? There will be no longer a voice to be raised in behalf of outraged justice or violated right; no longer a power on earth to assert the supremacy of the moral order, or to vindicate the law of nations. Cæsar triumphs, and the secular order is supreme. Well, has Bismarck ever asked himself, have his pets, the Italian robbers and assassins, worthy descendants of those who upheld the Hohenstaufen against the vicar of Christ, and against the glory and independence of their country, ever asked themselves, if the secular can stand on the secular alone, or civil or civilized society exist without the moral order, without re

ligion as the lex suprema of the nation? And when the church is gone, and might takes the place of right, who is to assert the moral order, or to sustain religion save as a vague sentiment without moral force, or as a degrading superstition? When conscience is destroyed, by being emancipated from the law of God, what is to sustain government and law, to save society from the most absolute and grinding despotism, or to save men from becoming downright savages or a herd of wild beasts? It is strange how men lose their faculties, and into what wild theories they can rush, when once they give way to their evil passions, and suffer Satan to bewilder and blind them by his delusions.

But we dare tell Dr. Döllinger, Dr. Littlejohn, the Churchman, and the Italian robbers and assassins, that, all-powerful as he seems, Prince von Bismarck will not succeed. We disguise not from ourselves or others the gravity of the situation, nor the apparent helplessness of the Holy Father. Human help for him, so far as we can see, there is none; and he is apparently left, as He was whose vicar he is, to tread the wine press alone. Power, wealth, fashion, literature, science, public opinion, the very spirit of the age,all, all are against him; and yet, without any hesitation, we tell Prince von Bismarck, as Mr. Ward Beecher's journal flippantly told the pope the other day, that "he has undertaken a job too big even for him." Satan has been trying his hand at it eighteen hundred years and more, and with kings and kaisers, princes and people to help him, he has not been able to succeed; and I do not think that Bismarck is stronger than Satan, or able to command more efficient allies. Satan has seemed on the point of succeeding, and flattered himself that he was just a-going to succeed, as a lady said, that "it always seemed to her, when eating vegctable oysters" (salsify), "that she was just a-going to taste a real oyster;" but he never gets any further. At that point he always fails, fails shamefully, and leaves his friends in the lurch. The simple fact is, that the church is not a purely human institution; man has not made her, and man cannot unmake her. If Bismarck and his allies had studied and understood history, they would know this, and know that no weapon forged against her can prosper, that his dart will barely strike the boss of her shield and fall harmless at her feet, or rebound and pierce his own heart.

We have seen the church in as great straits as she is in now more than once. She was so under the Arian emper

ors when, in the strong language of St. Jerome, "the world awoke one morning astonished to find itself Arian." Bismarck does little else than copy the astute policy of Julian the Apostate, and we see no reason why he should succeed in the nineteenth century any better than Julian did in the fourth. After the Arian heresy came resuscitated paganism. So, after the Protestant heresies, we may have revived paganism, for which every heresy is a preparation; but after paganism came orthodoxy in the fourth century, and the most glorious epoch in the church's history. Then came the Basils, the Gregorys, the Chrysostoms, the Hilarys, the Ambroses, the Jeromes, the Augustines, in the splendor of whose virtues the names of the champions of Arianism and paganism have become invisible. The Italians would do well to remember Arnaldo of Brescia who held Rome for ten years, and yet effected nothing against the papacy. Their ancestors drove the popes from Rome, and forced them into what the Romans called the "Babylonian captivity," at Avignon, and occasioned the great schism of the West; and yet, aided as they were by secret societies which covered all Europe then as now, Paulicians, Albigenses, Paterini, and others, that still survive in some of the degrees. of freemasonry, they did not succeed in overthrowing the papacy or destroying the church, any more than had done the Kaiser Frederic Barbarossa, whose crushing defeat by Pope Alexander III. the city of Alessandria, in the Subalpine kingdom, was built to commemorate. When Innocent III. was elected pope, Rome was barred against his entrance, and all the great powers of Europe, as now, were in schism and hostile to the papacy; and yet at the close of his pontificate, which lasted sixteen years, all the powers had become submissive to his authority, and never before had the papal throne been more powerful, perhaps, so powerful, throughout the Christian world. His pontificate was the age of great men and great saints. Nor did Frederic II., who included in his empire all Germany, all Italy, except Venice and Florence, and a considerable portion of what is now France, during fifty years of struggle against the papacy, marked on his part by great ability, finesse, treachery of every species, lying, perfidy and cruelty not surpassed, if equalled, by the most profligate of the pagan Caesars, succeed any better than had done his ancestor, Frederic Barbarossa. All Europe at length rose against him. The Holy Father, Innocent IV., if we recollect