battles. He had been crowned King of Italy. There was a king of Rome of his own making; Belgium was his; Sweden was reigned over by his creature; England alone remained, as it were, floating on the waters, and was one vast country defended by its. own waters. These were the only barriers to his universal rule. But in the zenith of his But in the zenith of his power there was an old unarmed man in the Vatican, whom, most unchivalrously, his armed men hurried away in the dead of the night. Weak and sick as he was, they hurried him along, with the blinds of his carriage down, lest whosoever should see him should recognise him to be the Vicar of Christ. That poor feeble man was in the grasp of the eagle; he was imprisoned at Savona and at Fontainebleau. This great Emperor was king of the world; and when this poor feeble man affixed to the doors of his church the sentence of excommunication, the Emperor said, "Does he think this will make the muskets fall from the hands of my soldiers ?"—" Within three short years," as an historian, and himself a soldier in that great and terrible expedition, writes, " our men could not hold their muskets." You know the history; that which has been shall be. 66 I urge you, therefore, think with the Church; live with the Church; let your whole heart and soul, every thought of your intellect, every affection of your heart, every emotion of your will, be with the Church of God. The Church of God is the presence of God, and the mind of the Church is the mind of God, and the voice of the Church is the voice of God. Next, love the person of the Vicar of Christ-not as an abstract principle, not the Holy See, not an institution, but the living breathing man, who has upon him the dignity and the unction of the Great High Priest. Be filially devoted to him; for the time is come when, according to the prophecy, he is the sign which shall be spoken against; he is set for the fall and for the rising again of nations. He is the test of the world; Pius IX., that despised name to those who are not of his family, is sifting the nations. And there are voices coming up now as of old, "Hail, King of the Jews!" and they would fain blindfold him, and buffet him, and spit upon his face. They mock him as a false king with a feeble reed, as an impotent king with a crown of thorns. They offer the mock loyalty of a revolting people, and they say, "Away with him! we will not have this man to reign over us; we have no king but Cæsar." But he is Vicar of Him who will judge the world. LECTURE I. I AM well aware that the truths and principles of Revelation have been, by the common consent of public men, formally excluded from the sphere of politics, and that to apply them as tests to the events of the world is regarded, in these days, as a weakness of mind. They who reject Revelation altogether are consistent in such a judgment; but with what consistency they who profess to believe in a revelation of the Divine government of the world, nevertheless consent to exclude it from the field of contemporaneous history, I cannot tell. I am therefore going, prudens et videns, to run counter to the popular spirit of these times, and it may be to expose myself to the contempt or compassion of those who believe the world to be governed by the action of the human will alone. To this I resign myself very willingly, and with no perturbation. My intention is, to examine the present relation of the Church to the civil powers of the world, by the light of a prophecy recorded by St. Paul, and to draw out certain principles of a prac |