Are we not ourselves witnesses of and actors in a struggle like or analogous to that which, before our day, divided our fathers? Yes, our century, soon to complete the third quarter of its term, itself also is engaged in this struggle between, so to term it, two opposing cities or communities. For some time past, this struggle seems to have entered upon a new phase and into a most sharp crisis.
With whom will victory rest, and which of the two principles shall carry captive the other in its triumph, so as to decide definitively the character of this epoch? That is a secret as yet only known to God, and it is not mine to attempt a reply to so hidden and mysterious a question. What I do know is, that we ought to oppose, with all our might, those who, wishing to bring about a violent retrograde movement in European society, threaten every day to carry us back to the age of Voltaire, and who present to us the saturnalia of '93 as the ideal of liberty, prosperity, and progress!
What I know, again, is, that but yesterday the antagonism between these two opposing powers (des deux cités) was personified in two men, upon whom, if I mistake not, the judgment of posterity has already begun to be made up: One of them, who represents, in all his serene majesty and with impressive authority even in his weakness, the force of right—the august and mild pontiff, whom twenty-two years of revolutions and ingratitude do not dishearten and dissuade from blessing the world, and calling down, by his prayers, upon sorely tried and troubled society, the spirit of wisdom, counsel, and peace; the other, that incorrigible leader of the antichristian army, the man of those bold deeds whose ephemeral triumph aspires to build up right upon force, but which one day, I hope, Italy will disavow in the name of her religious traditions, as well as in the name of her true and sound liberal traditions.
No; this nineteenth century, where by the side of so much that is evil there is so much that is good—so many generous sallies of self-devotion, so many hidden acts of self-sacrifice, so many solid virtues—the century which has given us a Curé of Ars and a Pius IX., an Affre and a Lamoricière, a Lacordaire and a Ravignan, an O'Connell and a Zamoyski, a Jane Jugan—founder of the Little Sisters of the Poor—and those students to whom not only France, but the Catholic world, are indebted for the institution of the Conferences of St. Vincent of Paul; this century will never be dragged down to the gemoniae scalae [Footnote 17] of history with the ignominious stamp upon it of having been the Era of Garibaldi. It will triumph over all the obstacles heaped upon its pathway by scepticism, by false science, and by the violence of party-spirit. These adverse forces seem at this hour, it is true, to take up with renewed energy the struggle which for eighteen centuries nothing has interrupted; but by so doing they only serve to show us more clearly our duty, and to urge us on the more strenuously to fulfil it.
[Footnote 17: The gemoniae scalae were steps in ancient Rome, near the prison called Tullianum, down which the bodies of those who had been executed in prison were dragged and thrown into the Forum, to be there exposed to the gaze of the multitude. TRANS.]
Translated From The French.
The Legend Of Hospitality.
"Legend or history, history or legend, there are truths to be culled from each, my friends," justly remarks that charming writer, Charles Nodier. A beautiful legend creates its own atmosphere of sweet and moral influences, as a flower exhales its perfume. Happy they who can discern and appropriate them! It is in these old and popular legends that oftentimes will be found infused whatever is most beautiful and pure of a nation's poetry and of its faith; they being, as it were, the expression of a people's thought. For a long time, indeed, those simple traditions of the past constituted, as we may say, the literature of the people's social gatherings, and served an important part in keeping firmly cemented the noble principles of family, of union, and of justice, which formed the triple corner-stone of all well-regulated society. When the trembling voice of the old man was heard, all were silent, and went forth after his narrative with souls deeply impressed, on the one hand, by the punishments which struck down the wicked, or, on the other, softly moved by the justly deserved reward that so often formed the graceful dénouement of some touching ballad.