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?
IV
The assailants of the Papacy are wont to say, in their own praise, that the Vatican has for its adversaries the most enlightened, cultivated, and virtuous men of our time. We, on the contrary, see the very opposite. With certain exceptions, including the blind, the dull, and the deluded, in the throng of declared enemies of the Roman Pontificate, we find only the moral dregs of society. There are great and small, of course, but, when put to a moral test, they are all equal, one as good as another, unless, indeed, the great are worth less than the small. In the throng, there are heretics without a creed, Jews without a Testament, atheists without a God, and Catholics without laws. We find deserters from every flag—those who betray their masters, and bite the hands of benefactors; doubled-faced deceivers—men who have instigated horrible massacres, and flattered every social crime; men guilty of infamous sacrilege, awful rapine, nefarious murders. We see corruptors of the people—burglars, brawlers, bombarders of harmless cities, mercenary writers, vendors of honor, protectors of evil haunts, worshippers of luxury. We notice all the apostates from the church and the priesthood: renegade Christians, silenced priests, unfrocked friars. We see men who insult God, disturb civil order, tear down thrones, cheat and defraud their neighbor—in short, men who blaspheme against the faith, and trample on the Ten Commandments. There is no kind of sectarian, from the most stupid of Freemasons to the most brutal of communists, that does not make part of this crowd of enlightened, cultivated, virtuous men of the present age.
The Prophet Daniel contemplated, in four shadowy, mysterious creatures, not only the four great monarchies of the earth, but the four great persecutions to which Christ’s church would be subjected in the course of ages. The interpreters of this acceptation of the vision agree in saying that the first, symbolized by the lioness, meant the persecution of Gentiles so cruelly prosecuted by the Roman Cæsars; the second, denoted by the bear, that of heretics; the third, represented by the leopard, that of false Christians; and the last, figured by a nameless creature awfully hideous, that of Antichrist, and so designated because, in ea erit omnium perversitatum concursus, it shall contain in itself the wickedness of the three preceding ones.[135]
It is, indeed, difficult to decide whether the terrible and universal persecution which the Catholic Church is now sustaining, especially in the person of the Sovereign Pontiff, should be referred to the third as its completion, or to the fourth as its preparation. When we consider the quality of the persecutors, they are undoubtedly false Christians, and worthy to be compared in ferocious malice to the leopard. But when we see in them the union of all perversity united to slay the church in its head, we suspect that the present is, indeed, a preparation for that final persecution which must forerun the consummation of the human race.
However that may be, it is beyond controversy that the persecution of to-day bears all the marks of Antichristianity, and that its promoters, followers, and accomplices accord with the description given by the apostle S. Paul to his disciple and Timothy. We give the text, let him deny it who can:
“Know also this, that, in the last days, shall come dangerous times.