turing of the Catholic Church and its divinely appointed ministers,-a pencil which its wielder deems as mighty as a sword, in his Quixotic efforts at artistic tilting,-hit upon this fine old anecdote as a capital source of inspiration for his mental photography, from which he reproduced, with some slight changes, the following picture. Our Holy Father, Pope Pius the Ninth, personified as a pontifical Canute, was represented as sitting upon the Tiberian strand, commanding the breakers to approach no further towards his sacred feet. Very fierce were these breakers, according to Mr. Nast's delineation; very mighty in their wrath, lashed by the storm-clouds around and about them. And their respective names were labelled on their foam-crested fronts," Italian occupation of Rome," German unification, French republicanism, Spanish liberalism, and all the other ations and isms they represent, were pouring their yawning billows at his feet, as he sat commandingly in his pontifical rocking-chair. To the right of the picture, the dome of the capitol at Washington, serving as a throne to the sculptured figure of American liberty, shone resplendently through the storm-tossed elements. No flattering courtiers, however, stood about the old mitred man in the rocking-chair; not one insidious fawner was there to soothe his ear, pained by the roarings of the storm, or his mind, supposed to be agonized by its unfettered approach; only one attendant could he boast, and that one a rival in deceit, blasphemy, and villany, to the whole of Canute's court, as with malicious leer he, in the pencilled form of Victor Emmanuel, "King of Italy," reclined with one arm upon the back of the pontiff's chair, and with the hand of the other twirled, with all the Re galantuomo's nonchalance, his extensive mustache, while, with far-fetched ideas of artistic unity, he was pio tured as whispering to the Pope, in the language of the well-known English ballad, which has so frequently been screeched out by "performers" in our modern American parlors: "What are the wild waves saying? We suggested at the time that Mr. Nast's artistic ambition had overleaped itself. overleaped itself. Our prophecy then was privately expressed, as we did not find it convenient just then to adopt the character of a public seer; but now that its realization is seemingly so close at hand, and we consider our prophetic reputation on the point of "getting out of the woods" of doubt, we will study the picture analytically, critically, and prophetically. And although the torrid state of the August atmosphere would seem to prohibit any such intellectual effort at attention, either on our own part, or that of our audience, yet we can assure the latter, that the seaside inspiration and the nature of the subject, will render it very seasonable if they will but lend a brief and kind attention. We must premise then that of all the pictures which the Harper's Weakly sheet has given to the public, from the one which represented the Pope as a woodchuck, about to fall into the hands of his pursuers, by being sawn off with the limb of infallibility from the dogmatic tree, on which limb he had run out as a final refuge, down to its latest reproduction of a photograph from Geneva, which represents Père Hyacinth dancing his infant son on his knee, and informing the public in a footnote, that he would gracious condescension!-come to terms with the Pope, only when the latter had at his bidding, given up his infallibility, and "blessed the cradle" of Hyacinth, junior. Of all these pictures, we repeat, this "marine view" of Nast's is the most unfortunate. The allegories are bad throughout, and return to plague the inventor rather than the parties caricatured. In the first place the ocean of European revolution is not represented as that calm smiling summer sea, which those who sail out so rashly upon its depths would have us believe it to be, but most truthfully as that fierce and turbulent high running sea, which sweeps indiscriminately before it all barriers of law, order, justice, and peace. Then the second incongruity that strikes us is, that the Pope, unlike King Canute, doesn't get up and run away, although he personally cannot stop the approaching billows; which yet, at the unheard bidding of him who alone sets limits to the sea, and commands the winds and waves to be still, lick, like the raging lions in the ancient forums, the martyr pontiff's feet, but do not devour him; he alone of all surrounding objects sits calm and imperturbable, while that pontifical throne on which he rests, weak and insecure as seems its sandy and sea-girt restingplace, serves not only to support him, but even acts as a barrier against the waves, an unsought-for security to his enemy in the rear, who watches their coming with a melancholy fascination. Even the massive and beautiful palace of marble representing the home and bulwark of political freedom, to be found in American institutions, is correctly pictured as almost submerged by the flood-tides of European revolution, so rapidly approaching our Western shores, all save the theoretical idea of liberty as conceived by our forefathers, but whose last and only refuge seems to be her native home amid the murky clouds, for unless those angry waves subside, not even the dome-like heights of American grandeur will serve her as a footstool. Then too the unanswered question which gives the picture its title, reminds us in its voiceless reply of a similar question, put, long years ago, by the enemy of God, in the prætorium of Pilate at Jerusalem, WHAT IS THE TRUTH? And the imprisoned lord of truth was silent, because the questioner cared naught, and would not wait for an answer. And so ever through the long, long ages sounding on, has that question gathered new strength by continual repetition from the mouths of the enemies of Jesus Christ and his Church; new moral force, from the fact, that they will not because they dare not wait for an answer, and consistently order their wicked lives therewith, and so it goes rolling on, or rests answerless" at the gate of absent opportunity," responded to for the foes of God only by the logic of speaking events, till that dreadful hour when the fate of the heathen and the publican shall be meted out to those who would not hear it from the mouth of Christ's spokesman, the Church. But we children of the Church, who have heard and believed, we who with the instinct of faith can see God in cloud or hear him in the wind," need no better interpreter than the lessons of past history, so consonant with the promise of Christ, "Thou art the rock; upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall never prevail against it." We look out upon the tottering ships at sea that represent our hopes, and are reminded of the storm-tossed bark upon the Sea of Galilee, so opportunely saved at the moment when all seemed lost. We watch, too, the little clouds no larger than a man's hand, that overhang the sea of modern revolution, when a favorable wind is blowing over its seemingly calm bosom, and we know them to be as the 66 little thunder birds that herald the advancing gale; and as when we pick up shells upon the strand and place them to our ears, we hear from their pearly cellules and diminutive caverns, the never-ceasing repetition of the roar of their native element, so from the little incidents around us, the scattered refuse of the bitter brine of revolution, we can catch faint echoes of its noisy upheavings and ceaseless unrest, and from all these things we weave more than a prophecy, we read the story of its fate blazoned beneath the dictating finger of a divine faith, a story that like the illuminated writing upon the walls of Belshazzar's banqueting hall, cannot be interpreted by the riotous spirits who haunt the palaces of revolutionary tyrants, but whose fears of overhanging justice are rightly resolved by the prophet of God. The spirit of our age is in every aspect revolutionary. It may be our misfortune to have our lots cast in such a period, but chastisement of some kind or another must necessarily be the lot of all generations, and if we will but carefully search out for what Tupper calls, "the good in things evil," we will find this one blessing to be concealed beneath all persecutions of the Church, namely, that they possess within themselves, from the very nature of their evil origin, those seeds of stormy disintegration which must bring forth from the womb of political chaos, that calm and rest which is to be the reward of those who have undergone the fierce ordeal of mental punishment and purifying penance. Vainly will the scoffers at the resolute and persistent faith of Christians look in the pages of history for any other result than confusion for themselves and triumph for the believer. The only wonder is, that these unbelievers will not see this, a wonder which can only be explained by the fact, that their eyes are wilfully blinded by their own deceits; argument has no effect upon such people, because they, having no knowledge of the essential nature of faith, its logical deductions as well as supernatural reasonings, cannot be brought up to the Christian's standpoint of observation, or hold discussion from the same premises or on a common basis with the divinely illuminated and truth-keeping Christian. This is why all religious discussion is so distasteful to many and so unproductive in results, in comparison with the amount of labor expended. But when in addition to blindness of the intellect, those outside of the Church or even the traitors within her pale, add moral perversity, they become like drunkards beating about in the darkness, until they fall in their blind rage into the bottomless pit, whose lurid and penetrating flames will make them, when too late, both see and feel through all eternity, those truths for which, like the idols of the ancient Gentiles, they had ears that heard not, and eyes that saw not. While, on the contrary, the faithful Christian, adding to the gift of faith the additional grace resulting from a holy life, never fails to touch God's right, even, as the poet says, in the darkness, and feel that he walks securely unto the revelation of his power and his glory, even in their influence on temporal affairs and mundane adversities. When did Satan's triumph ever appear more complete than in the days of Arianism? Yet for fifteen centuries who has seen or heard of it, save as a historical reminiscence! When was triumph more apparently overwhelming than that of Protestantism in the sixteenth century? Yet what is every effort of the Protestantism of the present day but an endeavor to save what it can of its own fortunes and fair name from the ravages of infidelity, while the Church which it had apparently crushed out of existence, is as young, fresh, beautiful, powerful, and terrible, to the eyes of her enemies, as though those very enemies had never straitened her about with their secret plots, chained her in prison walls, or bathed her in her own blood. Philosophers of this world, like the Roman guards on Easter morning, are stunned at the glorious outburst of external splendor, betokening the internal power of Jesus Christ, rising in the person of his Church over the powers of sin, death, and hell, and measuring by the shallow gauge of their own belittled wisdom, vainly ascribe to everything but the true source, the sometimes dormant, but never dead nor dying power of God. Yet what is all this but divine philosophy, teaching by example in her character of self-repeating history? Just so surely as she has taught of yore, so is she now teaching us again in the story of the nations. Let us read their present histories one by one, beginning with England, which, in point of fact is, after all, the real guardian of Protestantism. Her territory is the cradle of most of its latest offspring; her cash and her cunning counsels are to a large extent the resources from which its sway is extended over the European continent; within her limits alone, of all the Eastern hemisphere, is it fashionable to be a Protestant. There only is the prestige of respectability, aye, even of dignity, accorded to its bar-sinister on her shield. Without her patronage of the Protestant Reformation, the movement of Luther and his associates would in all probability have utterly failed to create more than a passing influence on Germany, whence it took its birth. She of all others has emulated in brutal and almost superhuman ferocity, the persecutions of the heathen emperors against the early church, without, indeed, the same palliating excuse to which pagan Rome could lay claim, namely, that she knew not what she did; Rome's persecutions were the offspring of the darkness of the heathen mind; England's persecutions were the result of the mad ferocity of a traitor to the truth. Yet what is the result to-day? Just as the Christians conquered the Cæsars, just as the cross replaced the crescent, so England, in the number, the wealth, and the importance of her converts, in the generosity of their piety, which rivals that of the Patrician converts of Greece and Rome, is the foremost apostle of the world's return to the faith. Long centuries ago, when the last of her Saxon kings lay battling with that death which was to give him the crown of sanctity, he prophesied with his failing breath, that after three centuries of apostasy and persecution, England should return to her union and allegiance with the mother Church of Rome. This may be only a legend, but it, in its verification, is as good as actual and inspired prophecy; and the ivydraped ruins of her ancient abbeys, the magnificent walls of her faithbuilt cathedrals, stand as witnesses from the grave of the past, eloquent in their silence when a Bute, a Westminster, a Norfolk, a Manning, a Faber, and a Newman, and all the countless scions of her noble houses come guided by the star of faith through the darkness of worldly sneers and anxious doubt, like the treasure-bearing kings of the Orient, to cast their wealth and their intellectuality at the feet of the Infant Jesus, personified in his new-born English Church, and manifesting his glory even through the swathing-bands that yet confine it. What have the wild waves of revolution said to her, what are they still saying, as she struggles to preserve even her mag nificent political stability from the inroads of false liberalists? The lesson which her religious movements prove she has taken to heart, PEACE ONLY THROUGH THE TRUTH. Germany, fierce and potent, parent of modern infidelity in all its countless forms, how have her struggles against the Christ and his anointed repaid her? For years she carried on the war of the investitures with the pontifical government, a power which, even in those days of the Church's highest temporal splendor, was but comparatively as weak as a plaything in the hands of the emperors, yet what was the triumph of Germany? Go view its semblance in the celebrated picture which Protestant fancy drew and loves yet to dwell upon,— the Pope placing his heel upon the neck of the prostrate doge of Venice. To what did Luther lead her when he seduced her to apostasy? To the horrors of the thirty years'war, and when that had closed, he bid her seek repose upon the bed of thorns bestrewn with social scandals, moral grossnesses, political factions, and soul-maddening sophistries, under the false name of philosophies; her political supremacy gone, her religion abolished, her very name a synonym for theories and heresies and false lights, that lured the world to ruin. Yet lo! notwithstanding when a Bismarck grasps a tyrant's sceptre, he finds her a united and regenerated empire throughout its broad expanse, and in spite of Lutheranism, the freest home the Church could boast; aye, freer even in the right of education than that accorded to her in our own favored republic, and in that very circumstance he, drunk with sudden fortune and unusual power, saw the worst obstacle to the mad schemes of those minions of infamy, whose idol and representative he is, the secret societies. Yet in the very crash of the political thunderbolts he hurls against her, in the wail of her imprisoned bishops and exiled priests and nuns, in the hisses of the people against his ingratitude towards his Catholic subjects, and even to many of his Protestant people themselves, who had built up the oneness and grandeur of his power, in the anathemas of the feeble, old, and imprisoned Pontiff at the Vatican, he hears as the surging of the coming breakers of counter-revolution, THEY THAT SOW THE WHIRLWIND SHALL REAP THE STORM. France, beautiful queen of Europe, when did the sceptre of a long line of resplendent sovereigns drop powerless from her grasp? When was the diadem of beauty first snatched ruthlessly from her imperial brow? Not while she took pride in claiming for herself the sublime title, First daughter of the Church. Not while she stood as an amazon with bared breasts and girded loins between the temporal kingdom of God and its enemies. No. Not under the descendants of the Church-crowned Charlemagne, but when she threw off legitimate authority; when, instead of rectifying what was wrong in her governmental polity, she courted what was worse, and murdering her kings, cast herself headlong into the arms of bloodreeking revolutionists, scoffers at all authority, human and divine, mockers even at and outragers of all natural instincts, who flooded with red republicanism the ruins of the altar and the throne. Vainly did she seek a remedy by her weakkneed compromises with liberalism under the Orleanists, citizen kings and Bonapartism, compromises that degraded the French Church, and only served to demonstrate the real weakness of the government. We put the question directly to almost any thinking man or woman, has there lived any one since the days of Louis the Fourteenth who really |