Page:Rome and the Revolution - Manning.djvu/16

Rh overthrown, the battle would be half won. Therefore it is that all the conspiracies of men are attracted to one point. Their whole array of heresy and schism, of infidelity and impiety, of sedition and revolution, is directed against the person who in himself sums up and represents to the world the rights of God and of His Church. You see then before you the two persons, and the two systems. The conflict is perpetual, and their enmity is irreconcileable. They may be called two Churches and two Gospels. On the one side is the Church of 'men of good will,' one, holy, visible, and universal; on the other, the ecclesia malignantium, as the Scriptures call it, the Church of men of evil will; one in enmity against the Church of God, though manifold as the multiplicity of evil; unholy in thought, word, deed, intention, and will; invisible, because secret, stealthy, subterraneous, working out of sight, and in darkness undermining the private purities of home, the public order of States, the thrones of princes, above all the throne of the Sovereign Pontiff, in whom both spiritual and civil powers unite. It is not more certain that the Catholic Church spreads visibly over the earth than that an anti-Christian conspiracy of infidelity and revolution spreads in secret under the Christian world. These two systems are in presence of each other. Hitherto the Christian order has maintained its supremacy. How long it shall endure, God only knows. So long as there is a Christian world, the temporal power of the Pontiffs will be sustained by its conscience and its instincts; when the temporal power is dissolved the Christian world will be dis-