village, never enters with the sciences into the cottage of the poor. He goes there with charity. He finds there a heart suffering, and consequently open; and the poor man, seeing the priest coming to him full of respect for his misery, and of feeling for his trouble, easily recognises truth in the garb of love.

But whilst I speak of charity a doubt presents itself to me. Ah! are we as charitable as we ought to be? Are there among you who are young souls ardent and affectionate towards God and towards the poor? Do you not see that troubles increase around you, that the measure is filling, and the world leans over frightful abysses? O Lord, give us saints, so long a period has elapsed since we saw them! And we had so many formerly! Cause some to rise again from their ashes! Exoriare aliquis ex ossibus !

The Church, Gentlemen, thus armed with reason and love, with the highest reason and the strongest love, what can men do against her? They can only leave her free, protect her, or persecute her.

If they leave her free, she will develope all her means, will gain first one soul, then another. She will extend herself so that the princes of the earth, astonished, will regard each other and say, "What is this power which fills all our cities, our country, our public squares, and will soon leave us alone in our palaces?" And they choose between these two alternatives, to protect the Church or to persecute her.

If the Church is protected as in the time of Constantine, it is one power joined to another; the imperial mantle spread over the Church cannot cause her shame, and may do her good.

If, on the contrary, they persecute her, then is her bright hour! It is that which God permits in the times of martyrs, it is that also which he permits when the Church has fallen asleep. Do you know what Saint Ignatius, the founder of the last great religious order, said on his death-bed to his troubled disciples, who asked

him, “Father, do you wish for nothing for us?" "My children," said he to them, "I desire for you persecutions." Persecution! From it we have sprung, it is our cradle. I myself I have sprung from blood to address Where should I have been if the eighteenth century had continued its peace to us? But persecution is come, and now, if we are sought, we are alive-behold us!

you.

Free, protected, persecuted, the Church loses nothing under any one of these rules, each imparts life, power, and glory to her. At this moment, the Church is everywhere stripped of her patrimony slowly acquired by her virtues; the civil authority has withdrawn itself from her; a new power, that of the press, has conspired for her ruin. Well, in the midst of universal change, the Church still persuades, and her astonished enemies, not being able to comprehend her existence, amuse themselves by prophesying her death. Like the dust which insults the passing traveller, this age, in ruin, outrages the eternity of the Church, and does not perceive that her immobility itself is proof of her strength. Elevated in the world by a persuasion of eighteen centuries, upon an antiquity of four thousand years, the Catholic Church is invincible because that which she has been able to accomplish everywhere she is able to do always. That which is universal is perpetual, as that which is infinite is eternal. For nothing can become universal in humanity but that which has a necessary connexion with the nature of man; and as the nature of man does not change, that which has a necessary connexion with it is also unchanging. If a persuasion as long in duration and as widely spread as that which the Catholic Church founded could perish in the human mind, it would be the same with human reason. What would a reality be if such a reality were only an illusion? For what say the last adversaries, the present adversaries of the Church? They maintain that man's reason is a continual progress in which each new idea destroys the old, where there is nothing stable and

absolute, where everything is destined to perish save that marvellous faculty which gives a moment's life to that which must necessarily perish. They thus confess the nothingness of their hopes and of their reason, which is but a passage through sepulchres in which it leaves a little ashes. But, as said Bossuet, "this miserable lot is not assured to them;" the Church is living even in the heart of their predictions; the human race, which has hoped so much, will never accept so much despair! Persuasion will never be extinguished in the human race, and the Church is no other thing than persuasion at its highest degree, than the kingdom of persuasion.

Ah, Gentlemen! if there is anything beautiful and sacred on the earth, it is the divine constitution which I have been analysing before you. What do men accomplish which approaches it? They, by force, raise up empires which yield to force. Cyrus destroyed the work of Ninus; Alexander that of Cyrus; the Romans that of Alexander. Force, sooner or later, meets with force; an isolated persuasion meets with another persuasion; but when persuasion has vanquished the universe, not in the sense of its passions, but in that of sacrifice, then there appears a divine and an immortal work. And if they who have done this are fishermen, if a few Galileans have founded this great empire of persuasion, in spite of all the efforts of physical power, then that work is divine and immortal beyond all created expression. And I, a minister of this work, a son of persuasion, a Galilean, I say to you, children of the age, How long will ye labour for that which passeth away, and fight against that which remaineth firm? How long will you prefer force to persuasion, matter to spirit? You say unceasingly, "We must not let the Church alone or she will become too powerful;" that is to say, "We must extinguish persuasion, which subjugates us in spite of ourselves." What more could you say to attest the divinity of the Church? Learn, in fine, what she is by the unjust sentiments of her enemies; learn by the marvels of her

constitution and history that their establishment and perpetuity are not works possible for man to accomplish; learn that all the good which is done in the world springs from her, directly or indirectly, and aspire to become her sons, to be her apostles, to range yourselves among the benefactors of the human race. The time is come for it. Everything is prostrate, it is necessary to re-construct; and the Catholic Church alone is able to lay down the foundations of an immutable edifice, because she alone possesses all reason and all love, and because man is too great not to be edified and saved by the highest reason and the strongest love.

THIRD CONFERENCE.

OF THE MORAL AND INFALLIBLE AUTHORITY OF THE CHURCH.

MY LORD,

GENTLEMEN,

WE commenced these Conferences by establishing the necessity of a teaching Church, after which we examined the constitution of that Church established by God to teach mankind. Returning to-day to our starting-point, namely, to the end for which the Church was established, we will remark that no one has the right to teach if he is not certain of that which he teaches, and no one has the right to ask for belief in that which he teaches if he is not infallible. There exists this difference between certainty and infallibility, that certainty consists in not being deceived in a given case, whilst infallibility consists in the impossibility of being deceived. Certainty is the actual connexion of a mind with a truth, infallibility is the perpetual connexion of the mind with truth. Certainty forms part of the means and privileges with which rational men are endowed, for without certainty the mind would be but a vast doubt. But infallibility does not appertain to a man, nor to the whole of mankind, because ignorance and the passions incessantly intervene between their understanding and truth, from whence it follows that men are unable to distinguish truth or to keep in continual and general com