Page:Christ and Antichrist - Manning.djvu/19

Rh band were men of noble blood, of time-honoured memory, of high culture, fighting side by side with simple, hard-handed, broad-hearted peasants, who, full of devotion, left their hamlets and their homes to defend the Vicar of our Lord, and with striplings of seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen years of age, mature in faith, and the manhood of Christian chivalry. These were the men who, forsaking home and all that life holds best and dearest, went to bear arms as private soldiers, without hire and without hope, except that of defending the person and authority of the Vicar of Christ, and of shedding their blood, if need be, in the justest warfare and for the holiest cause. God has accepted this offering only from a few; but there will be fathers, mothers, sisters, wives, who will mourn over this bier. You will pray for the dead, though the sanctity of their cause almost forbids it, that they may enter into the joy of those who, face to face, see Him for whom they died. And we may trust that their places here will be filled up tenfold—a hundredfold—that the manhood and chivalry of Catholics in all nations will spring forward with a new energy of devotion and close around the person of Pius IX. and of those who shall come after him, as an impenetrable wall of living strength, against which, if revolutionary violence or ambitious nationalism shall hereafter dash itself again, it may be for ever broken.

This outrage and its chastisement warn all nations of the Christian and civilised world to provide for their own safety. It is but one more of the outbursts of anti-Christian and anti-social revolution which have in time past struck at the head and centre of