4.
The Catholic Church was in the first instance a wanderer on the earth, and had nothing to attach her to its soil; but no sooner did persecution cease, and territory was allowed to her, than she began to exert a beneficent influence upon the face of the land, and on its cultivators. She shed her consolations, and extended her protection, over the serf and the slave; and, while she gradually relaxed his fetters, she sent her own dearest children to bear his burden with him, and to aid him in the cultivation of the soil. Under the loving assiduity of the Benedictine Monk, the ravages of war were repaired, the plantation throve, the river diffused itself in rills and channels, and hill and dale and plain rejoiced in corn land and pasture. And when in a later time a world was to be created, not restored, when the deep forests of the North were to be cleared, and the unwholesome marsh to be drained, who but the missionaries from the same great Order were to be the ministers of temporal, as well as spiritual, benefits to the rude tribes they were converting? And then again, when history moved on into the era of the first Turkish outbreak, who but St. Bernard, the very preacher of the Crusade, who but he led on his peaceful Cistercians, after the pattern of his master, St. Stephen, to that laborious but cheerful husbandry, which they continue in the wild places of the earth even to this day? Never has Holy Church forgotten,—abhorrent, as she is, from the Pantheistic tendencies which in all ages have surrounded her,—never has she forgotten the interests of that mighty mother on whose bosom we feed in life, into whose arms we drop in death; never has she forgotten that that mother is the special creature of God, and to be honoured, in leaf and flower, in lofty tree and pleasant stream, for His sake, as well as for our own; that while it is our primeval penalty to till the earth, she lovingly repays us for our toil; that Adam was a gardener even in Paradise, and that Noe inaugurated his new world by "beginning to be a husbandman, and by planting a vineyard."
Such is the genius of the true faith; and it might have been thought, that, though not Christians, even of very gratitude, the barbarous race, which owed a part of whatever improvement of mind or manners they had received to the fair plains of Sogdiana, would, on seizing on their rich and beautiful lands on the north, east, and south of the Mediterranean, have felt some sort of reverence for their captive, and, while enjoying her gifts, would have been merciful to the giver. But the same selfish sensuality, with which they regard the rational creation of God, possesses them in their conduct towards physical nature. They have made the earth their paramour, and are heartless towards her dishonour and her misery. We have lately been reminded in this place of the Doge of Venice[48] making the Adriatic his bride, and claiming her by a ring of espousal; but the Turk does not deign to legitimatize his possession of the soil he has violently seized, or to gain a title to it by any sacred tie; caring for no better right to it than the pirate has to the jurisdiction of the high seas. Let the Turcoman ride up and down Asia Minor or Syria for a thousand years, how is the trampling of his horse-hoofs a possession of those countries, more than a Scythian raid or a Tartar gallop across it? The imperial Osmanli sits and smokes long days in his pavilion, without any thought at all of his broad domain except to despise and to plunder and impoverish its cultivators; and is his title made better thereby than the Turcoman's, to be the heir of Alexander and Seleucus, of the Ptolemies and Massinissa, of Constantine and Justinian? What claim does it give him upon Europe, Asia, and Africa, upon Greece, Palestine, and Egypt, that he has frustrated the munificence of nature and demolished the works of man?