time and circumstance, then shall we advance and wax rich, then shall we grow great in the scale of nations, reach our proper dignity, and make ourselves a "strong kingdom;" then will we "eat and drink, marry and give in marriage," and haply we may even approach to the brave old days of Pagan Rome!

Such, if duly interpreted, is the lawless cry which reaches our ears, disguised, as it may be, under a mask of seeming order and under the goodly names of truth and enlightenment, of freedom and progress! If we would know its worth we may turn to the inspired words of St. Paul, rebuking by the peaceful tranquil majesty of truth this wild cry of human passion:

"This, therefore, I say, brethren; the time is short: it remaineth, that they also who have wives, be as if they had none and they that weep, as though they wept not: and they that rejoice, as if they rejoiced not: and they that buy, as though they possessed not and they that use this world, as if they used it not; for the fashion of this world passeth away."

But let us not be mistaken; we do not mean to say that every one is called to all those heroic acts of perfection which adorn the lives of the saints, such as the one just quoted by M. About. No! but all Christians are called in their measure to act by the same spirit which animated them, if they do not attain to the same degree of its perfection. We do not seek to weaken the ties of family: God forbid! We wish to sanctify and strengthen those hallowing and hallowed links, to raise them from the realm of nature to that of grace, to endow them with a supernatural strength, and give them their due place in the divine order of things; according to which the sun and centre of all our love is God, and father, mother, husband, wife, and child, yea all human kind in and for God, each as God ordains, each in the glowing burning charity of the sacred heart of God made man. Is this to stifle human affection and to strangle the human race? Is this "under the pretence of fearing God to cast aside all regard for man?" The flame of love is purified, not stifled; the human heart and the human race are not strangled but set free, being directed to its true end instead of being left to

* 1 Cor. vii. 29, &c.

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waste its affections, and prey on garbage ;" and man is ennobled by being raised to a life akin to that of angels: the fire thus purified burns the stronger, the heart loves the more warmly, and the whole man is transformed from a mere animal to a being through whom God scatters benisons on all around. The very press which pretends to hold family ties so dear, records in its pages the infamous revelations of a divorce court; the very statesmen who rail at a government in the hands of unmarried men, belong to a country where adultery has become legalised by the establishment of that court; and the English men and women who reproach the Catholic religion with disregarding and stifling human affection, form part of that people who flock in crowds to avail themselves of that human "license to sin.' But setting aside the fact of such a court being forbidden by God Himself, what a picture does it present to us of the natural result of following mere human affection and human motives! Moreover, it is apparent to all the world that these wretched divorce courts find their way precisely to Protestant countries; while Catholics who are accused of smothering natural affection, (because forsooth! they engraft it with the love of Christ), are the very people who hold divorce in abhorrence.

It is evident that the sacred ties of family, of kindred and of race, must become infinitely strengthened as well as elevated, the moment the most precious blood of Christ flows over them; the moment God becomes their end and their bond, and they all take their due place in subservience to Him who ordains and sanctifies them; they may lose in the passionate unquiet intensity of self-gratification, but they gain a million-fold in the calm unchanging constant burning love of the Holy Spirit; not dependant on the fluctuating feelings of the human heart, but equable and strong in the divine flow of its waters from a fountain deep in the depths to which mere sensation can never reach. Therefore it is that the foolish world can never understand it, and turns from it as cold! Yet the world can acknowledge the fickleness of the love after which it pants. Hear the complainings of one of its own poets, complainings beautiful though earthly and which every human heart knows to be true, in the plaintive strains of Moore, the Bard of Erin :

Alas, how light a cause may move
Dissension between hearts that love!
Hearts that the world in vain had tried,
And sorrow but more closely tied ;

That stood the storm, when waves were rough,
Yet in a sunny hour fall off,

Like ships that have gone down at sea,
When heaven was all tranquillity!
A something light as air, a look,

A word unkind or wrongly taken,
Oh! love that tempests never shook,

A breath, a touch like this hath shaken.
And ruder words will soon rush in
To spread the breach that words begin ;
And eyes forget the gentle ray
They wore in courtship's smiling day;
And voices lose the tone that shed
A tenderness round all they said;
Till fast declining one by one
The sweetnesses of love are gone,
And hearts, so lately mingled, seem
Like broken clouds,-or like the stream
That smiling left the mountain's brow,

As though its waters ne'er could sever,
Yet, ere it reach the plain below

Breaks into floods that part for ever."

Such is the value of mere human love! But let that. natural affection be elevated and sanctified, and placed in its proper order by the heart being fixed on God alone as the one centre of its affections, and at once there flow from that mountain summit streams of grace which bless and freshen and bind together with a supernatural closeness all human ties now made divine; so that to use the words of St. Francis of Sales, "God joins the husband to the wife with His own blood," and every family tie beams bright with the light of heaven. We have dwelt the more on this, for it is a common objection with Protestants that we make light of the ties of family, because we regard them all as subservient to the God who ordains them. And it is a matter strictly appertaining to the subject, and to the question of what is really progress or advancement in the human race. The family is the. nursery of the nation, it is the source from which it will derive its character, and a people will advance or recede in proportion as its family life is animated by the pure

fire of heaven, or merely kept alive by the selfish ties of natural inclination and mutual gratification.

Nor can we rightly test a people's rank in the scale of nations by looking simply to its aggregate and external prosperity. Be its wealth and commerce, its science and its intellect, its political and its military life what it may; let it rival ancient Rome, and throw Babylon of old into the shade; if it fails in its duty to the individual members of the state, if it hinders instead of assisting them to attain the end for which they are created, it has failed in its mission and fallen short in the task delegated by Providence to all temporal rule. It is a fallacy to judge of nations as one mass, apart from the individuals who compose them; at least it is a fallacy if we are to judge as Christians; in whose eyes one immortal soul infinitely exceeds in value all the kingdoms of the universe and the glory of them. It is said, that, at one poor widow's cry for justice, the heathen Emperor Trajan reined in his steed and returned from a martial expedition on which he was bound, till right was rendered her. And are we Christian men to allow the huge juggernaut car of this world's ambition and this world's greatness, to roll unquestioned on its way, heedless of the souls it crushes beneath its weight, the immortal souls Christ died to win; but who, in the judgment of this age, are to be as nothing in the balance when this world's policy demands their sacrifice, and calls it freedom! Ah! there is the freedom of the fiends,

"Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven!"

And there is the freedom of the Christian-" to serve God is to reign!" Which are we to choose? All turns on this. This is at the root of the Roman question, and of every other. We do not follow M. About into his statistics; let us first settle principles; be reform wanted or be it not; and for our part we believe, as in most such cases, that the truth respecting this question will be found between the two extremes; but even granting an urgent need of reform, it is quite plain that before all we must ascertain the standard by which our reforms are to be tested, and the rule by which we are to square them. Are we to seek freedom under the yoke of Christ, or by means of the goddess reason and the principles of the French revolution? Do we understand by the advancement of a

nation, and the progress of truth and light, the spread of the kingdom of Christ over souls, and the extension of His Gospel,-commerce, science, and material prosperity all taking their due place and part in this great work? or does progress consist merely in the development of these temporal things, in the growth of human intellect, of political and military greatness, of science falsely so called, of commerce and the rest, and in the opening a world-wide field to personal or national ambition? Is the religion of Christ to be the paramount, ruling, guiding principle throughout, or is it merely to have its place among other religions, as the Roman emperors gave Jesus Christ a place in their temples, side by side with their idols? In short, is the fact to be borne in mind or not, that mankind, in their natural state since the fall, are sick of a mortal sickness which can be healed by supernatural grace alone? that their natural corruption tends towards decay and moral death, not towards progress? that their only hope arises from the crib of Bethlehem and the cross of Calvary? that from that cross rules a King who will own no divided service? a lawgiver whose commands brook no opposition? a physician of mankind, whose discipline admits of no interference? who alone possesses the food of life, the balsam which can give healing and progress to the nations? Is He to be our King, or are we to have "no king but Cæsar?" He has brought us the true religion from heaven, and we ask in plain words,-Are Christ and His religion to rule the state, or is the state to rule Christ and His religion? Mons. About concludes his publication in words which leave no doubt as to his own opinion, and it is one too widely shared in by shallow-minded statesmen of all ages. He tells us :

"Princes will read over history. They will see that the strong governments are those which have kept religion under their control; that the senate of Rome did not allow to Carthaginiau priests the privilege of preaching in Italy; that the Queen of England and the Emperor of Russia are the heads of the Anglican and Russian religion, and that the sovereign metropolis of the churches of France ought legitimately to be at Paris."

The Romagnese Memorandum itself avows that the question is one of principle. "It is a question," says that document, " very different from that of introducing some laymen more into public offices;" it is desired to introduce