Will soon with plague be rife.”
The army is drawn from a population which the internationalists have penetrated and inoculated with their errors and designs, and their emissaries have been discovered tampering and fraternizing with the troops.
Who can tell how near is the hour when St. Peter’s will be officially declared the pantheon of red-republican Italy, and the statue of Garibaldi will be placed on the high altar where now stands the image of the Crucified God-Man? This will not be the end but the prelude to the final act of the present impending tragedy, when the black flag will be unfurled and the palaces of Rome, with St. Peter’s and the Vatican, and all their records of the past and centuries of heaped-up treasures of art, will be reduced by petroleum and dynamite to a shapeless heap of ruins. To those who can tell a hawk from a handsaw this is the hidden animus and the logical sequence of the entrance of the Piedmontese army into Rome. This is the real reading of the hand-writing on the walls of Porta Pia:
“Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return To plague the inventor. This even-handed justice Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice To our own lips.”
But is there not a sufficient number of conservatives in the present national party of Italy to stop the men now at the head of affairs before they reach their ultimate designs? Perhaps so; it would be pleasant to believe this. But the present aspect of affairs gives but little hope of this being true. These conservatives, who did not, or could not, or would not stop the spoliation of the property of the church and the trampling upon her sacred rights; these conservatives, who did not take measures to hinder the Italian radicals from possessing themselves of the legislative power of the present government and pursuing their criminal course—these are not the men to build one’s hopes upon in stemming the tide that is now sweeping Italy to her destruction. The dictates of common sense teach us to look to some other quarter for hopes of success.
III.—THE MISSION OF THE LATIN RACE.
How much of the present condition of the Latin peoples, politically, commercially, or socially considered, can be satisfactorily explained or accounted for on the score of climate, or on that of their characteristics as a race, or of the stage of their historical development, or of the change made in the channels of commerce in consequence of new discoveries, it is not our purpose to stop here to examine or attempt to estimate and decide. One declaration we have no hesitation in making at the outset, and that is: If the Latin nations are not in all respects at the present moment equal to others, it is due to one or more of the above-enumerated causes, and not owing, as some partisans and infidels would have the world believe, to the doctrines of their religious faith.
The Catholic Church affirms the natural order, upholds the value of human reason, and asserts the natural rights of man. Her doctrines teach that reason is at the basis of revelation, that human nature is the groundwork of divine grace, and that the aim of Christianity is not the repression or obliteration of the capacities and instincts of man, but their elevation, expansion, and deification.
The Catholic Church not only affirms the natural order, but affirms the natural order as divine. For she has ever held the Creator of the universe, of man, and the Author of revelation as one, and therefore welcomed cheerfully whatever was found to be true, good, and beautiful among all the different races, peoples, nations, and tribes of mankind. It is for this reason that she has merited from those who only see antagonism between God and man, between nature and grace, between revelation and science—who believe that “the heathen were devil-begotten and God-forsaken,” and “this world a howling wilderness”—the charge of being superstitious, idolatrous, and pagan.
The special mission of the people of Israel by no manner of means sets aside the idea of the directing care of divine Providence and the mission of other branches of the family of mankind. The heathens, so-called, were under, and are still under, the divine dispensation given to the patriarch Noe; and so that they live up to the light thus received, they are, if in good faith, in the way of salvation. The written law given by divine inspiration to Moses was the same as the unwritten law given to Noe and the patriarchs, and the patriarchal dispensation was the same as was received from God by Adam. There is no one rational being ever born of the human race who is not in some sort in the covenanted graces of God. It is the glory of the Catholic Church that she exists from the beginning, and embraces in her fold all the members of the human race; and of her alone it can be said with truth that she is Catholic—that is, universal both in time and space: replevit orbem terrarum.