but is altogether a bastard offspring. "Civil society now in France," says the Times' correspondent," means society in which religion, if it is to have any existence allowed it at all, must be satisfied to be either virtually a nonentity, or to do exactly what the civil power pleases." The elements of which they make it positively and negatively to consist, make it necessarily to be antagonistic to Christianity. They cannot harmonise together, as God designed they should, for the good of man. Each acting in its own sphere, collision no more would follow between them than between the sounds which convey delight to one sense, the ear, and the scents which delight another, the smell. The Vicar of Christ said, "divorce must destroy society." The inference from which is, that where it is-seeing it is not of God-that society which is of God cannot be, except in a putrid condition.

4

If there be any anxiety to the Catholic at the present day more grave than another, it is, How is the Vicar of Christ to be upheld in the exercise of his office and powers under the assaults that are being made upon him almost in every part of the world? The enemy, it is obvious, has made the discovery that the Church stands upon the Pope; that he is the Rock that follows the children of the new Israel (1 Cor. x. 4), and that he must be got rid of before the Church can be overthrown. The enemy has further discovered that the Religious Orders are the great strongholds of the Papacy, and that the only way

to destroy it is first to destroy them. Its teacher on this point is England. It is three hundred and fifty years since the English Crown, on the part of herself and Ireland, abjured the Papal power, not only in regard to its supremacy in matters of spiritual jurisdiction, but to everything else. The sovereign, to do this effectually, swept away every monastery and convent throughout the land, regarding them as the main fortresses of the Pope's power in the kingdom. The secular clergy, he, as several of his despotic predecessors before him had found, could be made to succumb. He had found them ready in convocation by a vote to transfer from the Pope to him and his heirs, whether male or female, the supremacy over the Church which our Lord had vested in St. Peter and his heirs on the Papal throne to the end of the world. So far have the French of to-day been taught by the king of England of an ancient date, how they might abolish the Catholic Church. Their mode of procedure, owing to the changes which time has made, is somewhat different. The Society of Jesus had not sprung up then. It has for about three hundred years come in for the lion's share of all the calumny which the enemies of the Church and of God have been the active propagators of. Though, of the greater orders, the last called into the vineyard, they are, as if by special privilege, always the first to be assailed when the Church or the Sovereign Pontiff becomes the object of attack. The worst words men can utter,

the worst scandals malice can invent, are made over to them. To make them as odious as possible in the eyes of the world, they are called by the secret societies "the secret police of the Vatican." Take away the epithet "secret," and the description would be a fair caricature of the office they have always borne as the foremost guardsmen of the rights of the Pope and of the Holy See. The Pope may be said to be their chief in a special sense. The ties which unite him with them, differ somewhat from the ties which connect the other Religious Orders with the Pope. They are not monks, confined to the choir and the cloister, as monks are. They say mass, hear confessions, and preach as other priests, whether secular or regular, do; they fast and pray as all other priests do. What mainly distinguishes them as a Religious Order is, the special work they were raised up by Divine Providence under their great founder, St. Ignatius, to do, at a time when the wolf had entered the fold and was "tearing the lambs from their dams" all over Europe. An earthquake that shook half the towns on the Continent down, could not have caused greater dismay than the revolt from Rome which took place a little before the close of the fifteenth century. The revolutionists, casting off all moral and ecclesiastical restraint, erected their battery against the Papal power, the citadel of the Catholic Church. It acted as a call to arms everywhere. St. Ignatius heard it, broke his

And so

sword, and obeyed; and in the course of a few years, at the head of a company which every year increased in numbers and strength, was mainly instrumental in stopping the spread of the revolutionary flame. All the world knows how he did this; the Catholic would say how God, through his hands, did this. As the revolt had sprung out of false teaching, and been fed on misinterpretations of God's written Word, true teaching, based on the authority of the Church, was the only means of counteracting it. This decided the line adopted by the Order of Jesus. largely had it the blessing of God, that their teaching and indefatigable labours in the course of time won for them the admiration and gratitude of all Europe. Their bitterest enemies, so far from denying them the credit for consummate skill and success in the art, or, as some would call it, the science of educating youth for the battle of life, have ascribed to that not only what was due to it, but what was due to a higher power, working in them and with them for the rescue of society from the anarchy and profligacy into which apostasy and schism had plunged it. On them largely devolved the task of replacing Catholic theology and natural religion on their respective thrones. Luther and his followers, in rejecting the supreme infallible teacher of the Church and of the world, the Pope, had destroyed the former; and Calvin and his associates, with their metaphysical system, debased the latter. The "Refor

mations" of Luther and Calvin were quite as much an assault upon natural theology and revealed, as upon the Papacy. Coming into existence while the débris of all that was most sacred in the kingdom of grace and of nature, as well as of reason, strewed the ground around them, it is not wonderful that the Society of Jesus shaped its course in such wise as specially to earn for themselves the deadliest hate of the so-called "Reformers" of Christianity. While their great labours and achievements placed them in the front of the Regulars from that time to the present, earning for them the admiration and gratitude of all good Catholics, their acquired influence in the world, as well as in the Church, has been equally fruitful of envy, jealousy, hatred, and detraction among political Catholics and in countries which have fallen from the faith. Among the secret societies which have now the rule of Europe, it is believed that it is the Jesuits, and they only, that preserve the Papacy from dying out; hence their present implacable hatred towards them in France and Russia. The secret societies thus unconsciously bear the highest testimony in their favour, to us Catholics, that any Religious Community could receive from men. And the very reason which they have for putting them down is the strongest we could have for keeping them up, while and where we have any power in the matter. But it is not on such testimony that we of this country depend. We