III.
But the glories of the cause for which Pius IX. is fighting receive also wonderful lustre from the strange modes and conditions of his warfare. He has neither arms nor soldiers; he is poor in gold; neither diplomacy, nor journalism, nor the telegraph is subject to his orders; he is morally deprived of the liberty of leaving the precincts of the Vatican, whose outer gates are guarded by the cut-throats of the Revolution. Arms, money, diplomacy, newspapers, and the telegraphic wires are in the hands of the enemy who besieges him before the tomb of S. Peter, and who uses them as far as possible to his injury. The artifices, conspiracies, calumnies, outrages, and insults of the Revolution succeed each other like waves on a tempestuous sea. And to make them more exquisitely atrocious, the greater number are hurled at him with the absurd protest that his inviolability is guaranteed by the majesty of the laws.[133]
Literally speaking, no other arms are left to the Holy Father than his constancy and his word; but it is a constancy that makes the enemy despair, and a word that confounds him. That apostolic breast is inaccessible to seduction, those august lips are inexhaustible of truth. He boldly defines theft to be theft, injustice to be injustice, tyranny to be tyranny; his language does not change with the times, nor to suit any one whomsoever. In condemning crimes and reproving villany, he has no respect for persons. He fears the powerful no more than the faint-hearted. He does not suffer himself to be deluded by the promises or dismayed by the threats of those who boast innumerable armies and glory in formidable artillery. The heart of Pius IX. is undaunted by the flash of swords and the thunder of cannon. The Revolution, unable to shake the firmness or chain the tongue of Piux IX., regards him with a shuddering admiration, and exalts with demoniac yells his superhuman power.
In very truth, a strange case! We see a victim and an assassin. The victim has only the moral strength of dignity and right: the assassin is opulent in brute force; yet the victim does not tremble before the assassin, but the assassin before the victim. The Revolution does not make Pius IX. turn pale: Pius IX. intimidates the Revolution. A rebuke from the victim strikes sharper terror into the assassin than the whole arsenal of the assassin can infuse into the victim.
This fact alone, in our opinion, is a striking proof that the Papacy is divine in origin, in its prerogatives, its life, its activity, its manifestation. The mysterious power which, with the simple virtue of a non possumus and a non licet, it exercises on earth, proves that God speaks in it, and its word proceeds from the Word of truth. What other mere mortal could by his own power produce effects so great with arguments so slight? A motto of Napoleon I. intimidated whole nations, because at his beck armed men stood forth and always victorious: his power was founded on iron and in blood. But on what soldiery rests the word of the Vicar of Christ, imprisoned in the Vatican? What invasion, what battle, can be dreaded as the result of a non possumus and a non licet of Pius IX.? Yet these words, uttered by his lips, strike perplexity into the leaders of all Revolutionary armies. How explain this wonder without admitting that the strength of Pius IX. is God’s strength? And after that, how deny that the stupendous greatness of the Roman Pontificate never shone more gloriously than now, whilst Pope Pius, in the name of the King of kings, and of the Lord of lords, pugnat gladio oris sui,[134] strikes with the sword of the Word, and conquers the satanic hydra of the insolent Revolution?