er by those who profess the
Catholic faith. God grant that such may always be our record!

It is just because the Church has ever resisted the tyranny of kings, in
their encroachments on the sacred rights of conscience, that she has
always been the victim of royal persecution. In every age, in the language
of the Psalmist, "the kings of the earth rose up, and the princes
assembled together against the Lord and against His Christ."(315) The
brightest and most thrilling pages of ecclesiastical history are those
which record the sufferings of Popes and Prelates at the hands of temporal
sovereigns for conscience' and for justice' sake.

Take, for instance, St. John Chrysostom, the great Archbishop of
Constantinople in the fifth century, and the idol of the people. He had
the courage, like John the Baptist, to raise his eloquent voice against
the lasciviousness of the court, and particularly against the Empress
Eudoxia, who ruled like another Jezabel. He was banished from his See,
treated with the utmost indignity by the soldiers, and died in exile from
sheer exhaustion and ill-treatment.

Witness Pope Gregory VII., the fearless Hildebrand, in his life-long
struggle with the German Emperor, Henry IV. Gregory directed all the
energies of his great mind towards reforming the abuses which had crept
into the church of France and Germany in the eleventh century. In those
days the Emperor of Germany assumed the right of naming or appointing
Bishops throughout his Empire. This sacred office was commonly bestowed on
very unworthy candidates, and very often put up at auction, to be sold to
the highest bidder, as is now the case with the schismatic Greek church in
Turkey.

These Bishops too often repaid their imperial benefactor by pandering to
his passions and by the most servile flattery. The intrepid Pope partially
succeeded in uprooting the evil, though the effort cost him his life. The
Emperor invaded Rome and drove Gregory from his See, who died uttering
these words with his last breath: "I have loved justice and hated
iniquity, and therefore I die in exile."

For the same cause Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was slain at
the altar by the hired assassins of Henry II., of England.

Observe how Pius VII. was treated by the first Napoleon in the beginning
of the present century. The day-dream of Napoleon was to be master of
Europe, and to place his brothers and friends on the thrones of the
continent, that they mi