these magnificent assemblages of bishops from all parts of Christendom have borne wonderful fruit to Christianity in their day. The very spectacle of them has sufficed to smite heretics with awe, while it encouraged the faithful by exhibiting to the eye, on so grand a scale, the union of Christ's mystical Body with its earthly Head. For the Pope, we must ever remember, forms essentially a constituent element in every General Council. St. Peter, over and above the special promise made to himself and his successors, is included again in the general declaration made to all the Apostles. His successors preside by divine right over every General Council; nor indeed can a Council be csteemed as General without his solemn ratification.

Oh how I rejoice to behold the Holy Father and the sacred Episcopate thus united. Never either in my thoughts or in my affections will I separate them. Never will I waste time and trouble in questions with which some persons perplex themselves, and which can never lead to any practical result; as, for instance, which is the greatest, the Pope or a General Council? or, by whom is the Pope to be set right if he fall into error? Such cases as these, I intimately feel, are simply illusory, and the attempt to resolve them manifests an imperfect estimate of Christ's proImise to His Church and of the solicitude of His paternal providence. The fact that so many ages have already passed, in all which time, even under the most deplorable circumstances, the supposed difficulty has never once occurred, is surely suffi

cient evidence that our Lord will never be wanting to His Church, and that He will supply all that is needful for the maintenance of that perfect union between His mystical Body and its earthly Head, which is the mutual strength of each. Instead, therefore, of making purely ideal suppositions, it is enough for me simply to ask, Who holds with St. Peter? For where Peter is, there, in the words of St. Ambrose, is the Catholic Church, and there with her, am I.

The thoughts which have just engaged us, and in which the faithful soul ever finds a continually growing delight, have been set forth, to the whole Christian world, with wonderful unction by the present Successor of St. Peter-the immortal Pius the Ninth. "God Himself," he says, in a late encyclical, "has established a living authority to teach and uphold the legitimate sense of divine Revelation, and to terminate, by an infallible decision, all controversies in matters of faith and morals; in order that the faithful may not be carried about with every wind of doctrine, or entangled in the mazes of error by the perversity of men that lie in wait to deceive. Now this living and infallible authority exists, and exists solely, in that Church, which Christ has built upon Peter, who is the Prince, Head, and Pastor of all the Christian people, and whose faith, He has promised, shall never fail,-in that Church, in which, from St. Peter, there has been an uninterrupted succession of Pontiffs, in possession of his chair, as inheritors and maintainers of his doctrine, jurisdiction, and privileges. And since, where Peter is, there is the Church; and whereas God

13

speaks to us by the Roman Pontiff; and whereas Peter ever lives in his successors, judges in their person, and, by them propounds the truth to all who seek it; hence the necessity of interpreting the word of God in that sense in which it is understood, and has ever been understood by this See of Blessed Peter, which, as mother and mistress of all the Churches, has always preserved pure and inviolate the doctrine of our Lord Jesus Christ, and has taught the same to the Faithful, setting forth to all men the way of salvation, of instruction, and of truth incorrupt. This is that supreme Church to which because of its preeminence the faithful of all countries must have recourse, and with which whosoever refuseth to gather is thereby convicted of scattering."

FIFTH MEDITATION.

The Catholic Church the preserver of morality.

As the walls and arches of a building rest upon the foundations, so morality upon belief. Thus, in maintaining the true faith, Holy Church has indirectly upheld the cause of good morals also, in addition to the direct influence which she has never failed to exercise. How grateful ought society to be for this incalculable aid!

The infidel philosophers, who, as an offset to their hatred of all dogmatic truth, affect a high respect for morality, including that of the Gospel

itself; and who think to supply for the absence of faith, by introducing in its stead those great principles of justice, prudence, and other virtues, which have been transmitted from the old Pagan times-these writers assume an apparent ignorance of the fact, that society owes to the vigilant care of the Church all that remains to it of any worth from this ancient moral code. Finding in Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, and other pagan authors, numerous social and political maxims, indicative of the highest wisdom, they would wish to give the whole credit of whatever useful influence these principles now exert on society, to men who were strangers to Christianity. But they deceive themselves. It is to the Church of God that this honour must be ascribed. The illustrious philosophers of antiquity having committed to writing those precious maxims of wisdom which, for the most part, they had inherited from an earlier and purer age, went their way one by one. In process of time the schools which they had formed became extinct. Their works perished, or became so rare and inaccessible to the mass of men, that they exercised the very feeblest effect on the public at large. It was left to the Catholic Church to restore their vitality, and to bring them into action on the new society that sprang up from amid the ruins of the old Roman empire. As the bird of the desert deposits in the sand the egg whic! not her own fostering care but the beneficent luminary of day will bring to maturity, so they departed leaving these germs of great ideas to be developea in a later age, by a more potent

influence. They departed. They went their way. They slept their sleep with kings and princes of the earth, fast folded in the tomb. But meanwhile the Church, that imperishable mother, that watchful sentinel of Israel who neither slumbers nor sleeps, was busy at her work, and by the loving warmth of her active and persevering zeal threw open to the world those treasures of ancient wisdom; while at the same time, by admitting them into her moral theology, she made them for ever her own.

But, O holy Church of the living God, if thou hast taken such care of the moral truths which have fallen, so to say, in thy way, what solicitude hast thou not shown in preserving that morality which is especially thine, the morality of the Gospel!-a morality truly divine, since it has. God incarnate for its author-a morality priceless in its worth and dignity, since it is the fruit of the precious blood-a morality which has remoulded mankind and introduced a second creation.

This morality so sublime, which unites man with God and with his fellow-man by the closest of bonds-which keeps a watch over, and purifies every least desire of the heart-which honours virginity, sanctifies marriage, directs the family and society, multiplies our joys, assuages our miseries-what would have become of it, O Church of God, in any other hands but thine?

What would it have become under the hands of heretics ancient or modern; of the Manicheans

Job. iii. 13.