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36 nations in which the people are Catholic are Catholic no longer. The unity of the nations in faith and worship, as the Apostles founded it, seems now to be dissolved. The unity of the Church is more compact and solid than ever, but the Christendom of Christian kingdoms is of the past. We have entered into a third period. The Church began not with kings, but with the peoples of the world, and to the peoples, it may be, the Church will once more return. The princes and governments and legislatures of the world were everywhere against it at its outset: they are so again. But the hostility of the nineteenth century is keener than the hostility of the first. Then the world had never believed in Christianity; now it is falling from it. But the Church is the same, and can renew its relations with whatsoever forms of civil life the world is pleased to fashion for itself. If, as political foresight has predicted, all nations are on their way to democracy, the Church will know how to meet this new and strange aspect of the world. The high policy of wisdom by which the Pontiffs held together the dynasties of the Middle Age will know how to hold together the peoples who still believe. Such was the world on which Pius the Ninth was looking out when he conceived the thought of an Œcumenical Council. He saw the world which was once all Catholic tossed and