mpressive days. Days of endless calamity, disruption, dislocation,
confusion worse confounded: if they are not days of endless hope too,
then they are days of utter despair. For it is not a small hope that
will suffice, the ruin being clearly, either in action or in prospect,
universal. There must be a new world, if there is to be any world at
all! That human things in our Europe can ever return to the old sorry
routine, and proceed with any steadiness or continuance there; this
small hope is not now a tenable one. These days of universal death
must be days of universal new-birth, if the ruin is not to be total and
final! It is a Time to make the dullest man consider; and ask himself,
Whence _he_ came? Whither he is bound?--A veritable "New Era," to the
foolish as well as to the wise.

Not long ago, the world saw, with thoughtless joy which might have been
very thoughtful joy, a real miracle not heretofore considered possible
or conceivable in the world,--a Reforming Pope. A simple pious creature,
a good country-priest, invested unexpectedly with the tiara, takes up
the New Testament, declares that this henceforth shall be his rule
of governing. No more finesse, chicanery, hypocrisy, or false or foul
dealing of any kind: God's truth shall be spoken, God's justice shall be
done, on the throne called of St. Peter: an honest Pope, Papa, or Father
of Christendom, shall preside there. And such a throne of St. Peter;
and such a Christendom, for an honest Papa to preside in! The European
populations everywhere hailed the omen; with shouting and rejoicing
leading articles and tar-barrels; thinking people listened with
astonishment,--not with sorrow if they were faithful or wise; with awe
rather as at the heralding of death, and with a joy as of victory beyond
death! Something pious, grand and as if awful in that joy, revealing
once more the Presence of a Divine Justice in this world. For, to such
men it was very clear how this poor devoted Pope would prosper, with his
New Testament in his band. An alarming business, that of governing
in the throne of St. Peter by the rule of veracity! By the rule of
veracity, the so-called throne of St. Peter was openly declared, above
three hundred years, ago, to be a falsity, a huge mistake, a pestilent
dead carcass, which this Sun was weary of. More than three hundred years
ago, the throne of St. Peter received peremptory judicial notice to
quit; authentic order, registered in Heaven's chan