Page:Christ and Antichrist - Manning.djvu/16

Rh more in the traditional office of France in protecting the Centre and Head of Christendom, she has placed herself in the lead of the Christian order, the Christian justice, the Christian chivalry of the world. May God maintain her firm and inflexible in this noblest mission upon earth! The Catholic world will confirm her acts by the sympathy and assent of its heart and conscience. France has thereby invoked upon herself the enmity, scorn, and railing of anti-Catholic and anti-Christian factions. But she has won to herself the confidence and the sympathy of every man among the two hundred millions in all lands, who refuse to offer up the supernatural unity, order, and purity of the Christian world as a homage to the tyranny of modern Nationalism, the deification of the civil power, the anti-Christian hatred against the Church of God. Let France stand firm, and she may stay the plague which is devouring Christian Europe. The prayers of all good men will ascend for her. These things bring to my mind others of a sadder cast, and nearer to ourselves. But I forbear to speak of my own country.

There are, however, happier thoughts, to which I gladly turn.

The late events have detected and exposed with a terrible but just retribution the hollowness, the imposture, the falsehood, the vainglory, the impotence of the Revolution. Grandiloquence, mystery, pretended ubiquity, for a long time terrified or distracted the friends of order. But the veil is rent, and the idol is broken. On the 1st of November the ringleader of this godless anarchy proclaimed to the world