, and in all barbarous races within our world, there are tens of
thousands who have left their national law and customary gods for the law
of Moses and the Word of Jesus Christ, though to adhere to that law is to
incur the hatred of idolaters and the risk of death besides to have
embraced that Word; and considering how, in so few years, in spite of the
attack made on us, even to the loss of life or property, and with no great
store of teachers, the preaching of that Word has found its way into every
part of the world, so that Greek and Barbarian, wise and unwise, adhere to
the religion of Jesus, doubtless it is a work greater than any work of
man."

This Catholicity, or universality, is not to be found in any, or in all,
of the combined communions separated from the Roman Catholic Church.

The Schismatic churches of the East have no claim to this title because
they are confined within the Turkish and Russian dominions, and number not
more than sixty million souls.

The Protestant churches, even taken collectively, (as separate communions
they are a mere handful) are too insignificant in point of numbers, and
too circumscribed in their territorial extent, to have any pretensions to
the title of Catholic. All the Protestant denominations are estimated at
sixty-five million, or less than one-fifth of those who bear the Christian
name. They repudiate, moreover, and protest against the name of Catholic,
though they continue to say in the Apostles' Creed "I believe in the Holy
Catholic Church."

That the Roman Catholic Church alone deserves the name of _Catholic_ is so
evident that it is ridiculous to deny it. Ours is the only Church which
adopts this name as her official title. We have possession, which is
nine-tenths of the law. We have exclusively borne this glorious
appellation in troubled times, when the assumption of this venerable title
exposed us to insult, persecution and death; and to attempt to deprive us
of it at this late hour, would be as fruitless as the efforts of the
French Revolutionists who sought to uproot all traces of the old
civilization by assigning new names to the days and seasons of the year.

Passion and prejudice and bad manners may affix to us the epithets of
_Romish_ and _Papist_ and _Ultramontane_, but the calm, dispassionate
mind, of whatever faith, all the world, over, knows us only by the name of
_Catholic_. There is a power in this name and an enthusiasm aroused by it
akin to the patrio