orders. He could not appear before the congregation, lest the zeal of his Catholic children might get the better of their prudence, and cries of Viva il Papa! might bring upon innocent friends the indignation of the Italian government, as they had done on a former occasion.
This day we were to see no illuminations of the grand façade and the broad portico; no brilliantly-lighted cupola, visible to the furthest corner of Rome; none of the imposing ceremonies that have been so much sought after and admired by Protestants. These latter go away from the Easter celebrations dissatisfied, sometimes annoyed and angry, that they should be deprived of the fine sights “just for a whim of the Pope.” We heard them utter these words as we passed down the massive steps leading to the piazza. They seemed to forget that holy church puts not forth her beauties solely for the delectation of Protestants who come to Rome at Christmas and Easter “to see sights.” They might know that when her Head is bowed with sorrow, all true children of the church carry the same cross, the whole body suffering with the head. There was joy tempered with much sadness in our hearts as we went from the noble basilica and wandered away to the Coliseum, fit emblem of the church in the Rome of to-day. Ruthless hands—hands of those who would make Rome like any modern city—have shorn this sacred spot of half its beauties; hard hearts have stripped it of its hallowed stations and forbidden the people to pray where the martyrs shed their blood.
THE ETERNAL YEARS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE DIVINE SEQUENCE.”
IV
THE CHARACTERISTICS OF GOD’S GOVERNMENT—LONGANIMITY
As a lavish and yet unwasteful abundance was the first condition and eminent characteristic of the creation, so is longanimity, or patience, the special quality which marks the dealings of God with his creatures, in the gradual and long-enduring developments of his government. It is the quality to which we are most indebted, and yet which, as regards the history of mankind, we value and understand the least. Possibly the fact of our own brevity of life, as compared with the multitude of thoughts, efforts, and emotions which the immortality of our being crowds across the narrow limit of time, leaving an impression of breathlessness and haste, may put it almost out of our power—save as all things are possible by the grace of God—to raise ourselves to any approximate appreciation of God’s long-enduring patience. And this is increased in the minds of those who are zealous for God’s glory. They chafe at the outrages committed against his law; they sicken before the long, dreary aspect of man’s incredulity and hardness of heart; and the rise of a new heresy, the advent of an antipope, or the horrors of a French Revolution lead them hastily to conclude, and impatiently to wish, that the last day may be at hand. Experience is a slow process. At fifty a man only begins to learn the great value of life and to look back
with marvel at the lavish waste of his earlier years. But if to the individual the convictions resulting from experience are of slow and laborious growth, they are still more so to the multitude. Consequently, though more than eighteen hundred years have come and gone since St. John wrote to his disciples, “Little children, it is the last hour,” nevertheless the pious of all shades of opinion in all ages have not been afraid to utter random guesses that the end of the world cannot be far off because of the wickedness of men. It is indeed true, as the Holy Ghost spoke by St. John, that it is the “last hour.” But what does that “last hour” mean? Not surely a literal last hour or last day, but a last epoch. The epoch in the history of the cosmos before the coming of the Redeemer—that is, before the hypostatic union in a visible, tangible, and real human body of the second Person of the Triune Godhead—was the first hour, or the first epoch. The period since the Incarnation is the last hour, or the last epoch; because nothing mightier or greater can take place than the fact of God taking flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin. It is the consummation; it is the one great end of all creation. This last epoch will have its eras, evolving themselves within the bosom of the Catholic Church, just as the first epoch had its eras