gloating
with fiendish joy over the calamities of the Pope; who are heaping insults
and calumnies on his venerable head, while he is in the hands of his
enemies,(190) and who are confidently predicting the downfall of the
Papacy, from the present situation of the Head of the Church, as if the
temporary privation of his dominions involved their irrevocable loss; or,
as if even the perpetual destruction of the temporal power involved the
destruction of the spiritual supremacy itself. "The Papacy," they say, "is
gone. Its glory is vanished. Its sun is set. It is sunk below the horizon,
never to rise again." Ill-boding prophets, will you never profit by the
lessons of history? Have not numbers of Popes before Pius IX. been
forcibly ejected from their See, and have they not been reinstated in
their temporal authority? What has happened so often before may and will
happen again.

For our part we have every confidence that ere long the clouds which now
overshadow the civil throne of the Pope will be removed by the breath of a
righteous God, and that his temporal power will be re-established on a
more permanent basis than ever.

But whatever be the fate of the Pope's temporalities, we have no fears for
the spiritual throne of the Papacy. The Pontiffs have received their
earthly dominion from man, and what man gives man may take away. But the
spiritual supremacy the Bishops of Rome have from God, and no man can
destroy it. That Divine charter of their prerogatives, "Thou art Peter,
and on this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not
prevail against it,"(191) will ever shine forth as brightly as the sun,
and it is as far as the sun above the reach of human aggression.

The Holy Father may live and die in the catacombs, as the early Pontiffs
did for the first three centuries. He may be dragged from his See and
perish in exile, like the Martins, the Gregories and the Piuses. He may
wander a penniless pilgrim, like Peter himself. Rome itself may sink
beneath the Mediterranean; but the chair of Peter will stand, and Peter
will live in his successors.

Chapter XIII.

THE INVOCATION OF SAINTS.

Christians of most denominations are accustomed to recite the following
article contained in the Apostles' Creed: "I believe in the communion of
Saints." There are many, I fear, who have these words frequently on their
lips, without an adequate knowledge of the precious meaning