racter and address of the minister, as is rapidly becoming the fact in all Protestant sects, we may take it for granted that Protestantism has seen its best days, is going the way of all the earth, and soon the place that has known it shall know it no more for ever. Protestantism, with all deference to our author, who pronounces it imperishable, we venture to say, has well-nigh run its course. It began by divorcing the church from the papacy and subjecting religion to the national authority, subordinating the spiritual to the temporal, the priest to the magistrate, the representative of heaven to the representative of earth. It constituted the national sovereign the supreme head and governor, the pontifex maximus, after the manner of the Gentiles, of the national religion, or the national church, and punished dissent as treason against the prince. It was at first, and for over two centuries, bitterly intolerant, especially against Catholics, whom it persecuted with a refined cruelty which recalled, if it did not surpass, that practised by paganism on Christians in the martyr ages. Tired of persecution, or finding it impotent to prevent dissent, Protestantism tried after a while its hand at civil toleration. The state tolerated, to a greater or less extent, at first only Protestant dissenters from the established church; but at last, though with many restrictions, and with the sword ever suspended over their heads, even Catholics themselves. From civil toleration, from ceasing to cut the throats and confiscate the goods of Catholics, and of Protestant recusants, it is passing now to theological tolerance, or what it calls complete religious liberty, though as yet only its advanced-guard have reached it. republic, does not, indeed, disclaim its supremacy over the church; but it leaves religion to take care of itself, as a thing beneath the notice of the civil magistrate, so long as it abstains from interfering with state policy, or meddling with politics. Today Protestantism divorces, or is seeking to divorce, the church from the state, as it began by divorcing both her and the state from the papacy; it divorces religion from the church and from morality, Christianity from Christ, faith from dogma, piety from reason, and it resolves into an af fection of man's emotional or sentimental nature. We find persons calling themselves Christians who do not believe in Christ, or regard him as a myth, and godly, who do not even believe in God. We have men, and women too, who demand the disruption of the marriage tie in the name of morality, and free love in the name of purity. Words lose their meaning. The churl is called liberal, things bitter are called sweet, and things profane are called holy. Not many years since, there was published in England, and republished here, an earnest and ingenious poem, designed to rehabilitate Satan, and chanting his merits as man's noblest, best, and truest friend. In the mean time, every thing regarded as religion loses its hold on the new genera tions; moral corruption of all sorts in public, domestic, and private life is making fearful progress throughout the Anglo-Saxon world, the mainstay of Protestantism; and society seems tottering on the verge of dissolution. Such is the career Protestantism has run, is running, or, by the merciless logic to which it is subjected, will be forced to run. What hope, then, can Protestants have for its future? As to the future of Catholicity, we are under no apprehensions. We The state, unless in the American know that never can the church be in this world the church triumphant, and that she and the world will always be in a state of mutual hostility; but the hostility can never harm her, though it may cause the spiritual ruin of the individuals and nations that war against her. The Protestant world have for over three hundred years been trying to get on without her, and have succeeded but indifferently. Sensible and earnest minded men among Protestants themselves boldly pronounce that the experiment has failed, which most Protestants inwardly feel, and sadly deplore; but like the poor man in Balzac's novel, who has spent his own patrimony, his wife's dower, the portion of his daughter, with all he could borrow, beg, or steal, and reduced his wife, his children, and himself to utter destitution, in the recherche d'absolu, they are buoyed up by the feeling that they are just a-going to succeed. But even this feeling cannot last always. Hope too long "deferred maketh the heart sick." It may be long yet, and many souls for whom Christ has died be lost, before the nations that have apostatized learn wisdom enough to abandon the delusive hope, and turn again to Him whom they have rejected, or look again, weeping, on the face of Him whom they have crucified. But the church will stand, whether they return or not; for she is founded on a rock that cannot be shaken, on the eternal truth of God, that cannot fail. The Protestant experiment has demonstrated beyond question that the very things in the Catholic Church which are most offensive to this age, and for which it wages unrelenting war against her, are precisely those things it most needs for its own protection and safety. It needs, first of all, the Catholic Church-nay, the papacy itself to declare and apply the law of God to states and empires, to sovereigns and subjects, kings and peoples, that politics may no longer be divorced from religion, but be rendered subsidiary to the spiritual, the eternal end of man, for which both individuals and society exist and civil governments are instituted. It needs the church to declare and enforce the law, by such means as she judges proper, that should govern the relation of the sexes; to hallow and protect marriage, the basis of the family, as the family is of society, that great sacrament or mysterious union, typical of the union of Christ with the church, which is indissoluble; to take charge of education, and to train up, or cause to be trained up, the young in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, or in the way they should go, that when old they shall not depart from it; to teach maidens modesty and reserve, and wives and mothers due submission to their husbands and proper care of their children; to assert and protect the rights of women; to train them to be contented to be women, and not to aspire to be men, or to usurp the functions of men, and to bid them stay at home, and not be gadding abroad, running over the country and spouting nonsense, free love, infidelity, impiety, and blasphemy, at suffrage conventions and other gatherings, at which it is a shame for a woman to open her mouth, or even to be present; and, most of all, to exercise a vigilant censorship over ideas, whether vented in books, journals, or lectures, and to keep from the public those which tend to mislead the mind or corrupt the heart, as a prudent father strives to keep them from his children. The age needs for this the Catholic Church. A national church cannot do it; far less can the sects do it. These all depend on the public opinion of the age, the nation, or the sect, and have no power to withstand that opinion. This is perhaps better understood here than elsewhere. The sects, being creatures of opinion, have no power to control it, and their tendency is invariably to seize upon every opinion, excitement, or movement that is, or is likely to be, popular, and help it on as the means of swelling, when it is at flood-tide, their own respective numbers. A national church has undoubtedly more stability, and is not so easily wrested from its moorings. But it has only the stability of the government that ordains it, and the most absolute government must sooner or later yield to the force of opinion. Opinion has disestablished and disendowed the state church in Ireland, and will, as is most likely, do it ere long in both England and Scotland. The Protestant sects have no alternative; they must either yield to the dominant opinion, tendency, or passion of the times and move on with it, or be swept away by it. It is only a church truly catholic, that depends on no nation, that extends to all, and is over all, that derives not its being or its strength from the opinion of courts or of peoples, but rests on God for her being, her law, and her support, that can maintain her integrity, or have the courage to stand before an age or a nation, denounce its errors, and condemn its dominant passion or tendency, or that would be heeded, if she did. It was only the visible head of the Catholic Church, the vicar of Christ, that could perform the heroic act of pub lishing in this century the Syllabus ; and if, as we are confident they have, the prelates assembled in the Council of the Vatican have some share of the courage of their chief, their decrees will not only draw the attention of the world anew to the church, but go far to prove to apostate nations and truculent governments that she takes counsel of God, not of the weakness and timidity of men. A few more such acts as the publication of the Syllabus and the convocation of the council now sitting at Rome, joined to the manifest failure of Protestantism, will serve to open the eyes of the people, disabuse nonCatholics of the delusions under which they are led away to their own destruction. The very freedom, though false in principle, which is suffered in Protestant nations, while it removes all restraints from infidelity, immorality, and blasphemy, aids the victory of the church over her enemies. It ruins them by suffering them to run into all manner of excesses; but she can use it without danger and with advantage where there are minds to be convinced or hearts to be won; for she can abide the freest examination, the most rigid investigation and scrutiny, while the indwelling Holy Ghost cannot fail to protect her from all error on either side. The present delusions of the loud-boasting nineteenth century must give way before her as she once more stands forth in her true light, and her present enemies be vanquished. DION AND THE SIBYLS. A CLASSIC, CHRISTIAN NOVEL. BY MILES GERALD KEON, COLONIAL SECRETARY, BERMUDA, AUTHOR OF "HARDING, THE MONEY-SPINNER," ETC. DEDICATION. 1 DEDICATE the following work to Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton, not only in appreciation of one of the most searching, comprehensive, independent, and indefatigable thinkers, and one of the truest and highest men of genius, of whom it has ever been the lot of his own country and of the English-speaking races to be proud, and the fate of contemporary nations to feel honorably jealous; not only in admiration of a mind which nature made great, and which study has to the last degree cultivated, whose influence and authority have been steadily rising since he first began to labor in literary fields more varied than almost any into which ONE person had previously dared to carry the efforts of the intellect; but still more as an humble token of the grateful love which I feel in return for the faithful and consistent friendship and the innumerabie services with which a great genius and a great man has honored me during twenty years. MILES GERALD KEON. PARIS, Jan. 18, 1870. INTRODUCTION. The historical romance of Mr. Keon, now republished with the author's most cordial permission and his latest corrections, was first printed in London, in 1866, by Mr. Bentley, publisher in ordinary to the Queen. The edition was brought out in a very handsome style, and sold at the high price of a guinea. Notwithstanding the heavy price at which the work was furnished to our transpontine kinsfolk, (or at least to the "upper ten thousand" of them,) it is at this moment out of print, and an effort made about two years ago to procure copies for sale in this country was unsuccessful. The copy kindly sent us by the author was accidentally mislaid for several months, and this circumstance, together with the desire to give our readers the opportunity of perusing the work as soon as their attention should be directed to it by a notice such as its high merit demands, caused us to delay the proper public acknowledgment to the author until the present moment. Its success in England, in spite of the nationality and religion of the writer, is no slight proof of its intrinsic excellence, especially when we consider that he ventured into a field which the subject-matter of the book would turn into the very home and headquarters of English prejudice. To every effect adequate cause; and, in this instance, to those who take up the story of Dion, one cause of its success will, before they have gone half way through its events and adventures, speak for itself. Yet, however light to read, the work has, we feel convinced, been in the last degree laborious both to plan and to execute. "Easy writing," said Thomas Moore, " very often makes fearfully hard reading." We believe the converse has often proved equally true. We are glad to learn that Mr. Keon has recently received a far more gratifying recognition of his distinguished merit than any other to which a Catholic author can aspire. At a private audience granted him by Pius IX., His Holiness complimented him on his services to literature and religion, and gave him a beautiful rosary of pearl as a token of his august favor. One word more, and we shall let the story itself begin to be heard. The epoch of Dion was the turning-point of all human history-the hinge of the fateful gates, the moment of the mightiest and most stupen dous transition our world has ever known, the transition of transitions; the moment on this earth of a superplanetary, supercosmic drama. There were two suns in the heavens; one rising, never to set; the other going down to rise no more. At no epoch had human genius blazed so luminous, or human pride poised itself on wings so wide, in a sphere so sublime; but this genius was for the first time confronted in its own sphere by divine inspiration and a supernatural authority. The setting of a classic though pagan day saw the dawning day of Christianity. There were two suns in one sky at the same moment. The doubtful cross-lights of two civilizations overarched the world with a vault of shifting, contending, contrary, and awful splendorsthose of one order in the utmost intensity of their radiance, those of the other in their first, glimmering beginnings; a seeming confusion; an internecine war; a hazy mingling of embattled glories as full of meaning as it was of mystery. ED. CATH. WORLD. CHAPTER I. been designed as an image of the great modern conqueror, there had been something to censure. But the work which, at one and the same time, delineates the second Cæsar, and yet now after 1800 years recalls to mind the first Napoleon, has become a curious monument indeed. The second Roman emperor, however, had not a forehead so broad and commanding nor so marble smooth as Napoleon's, and the whole countenance, at the time when our narrative begins, offered a more decisively aquiline curve, with more numerous and much thinner lines about the mouth. Still, even at the age which he had then reached-in the year eleven of our Lord-he showed traces of that amazing beauty which had enchanted the whole classic world in the days of his youth. Three years more, and his reign and life were to go down in a great, broad, calm, treacherous sunset together. It was a fair evening in autumn, toward the end of the year eleven of our Lord. Augustus Cæsar was a white-haired, olive-complexioned, and somewhat frail-featured, though stately man of more than seventy-three. At the beginning of the century in which this was written, the face of the first Napoleon recalled to the minds of antiquaries and students of numismatic remains the lineaments, engraved upon the extant coins of Augustus. Indeed, at this moment there is in the Vatican a beautiful After the senate had rewarded the marble bust in excellent preservation, representing one of these two emperors as he was while yet young; and this bust almost invariably produces a curious effect upon the stranger who contemplates it for the first time. "That is certainly a beautiful artistic work," he says, "but the likeness is hardly perfect." "Likeness of whom ?" replies some Italian friend. "Of the emperor," says the stranger. "Sicuro! But which emperor ?" asks the Italian, smiling. "Of course, the first," says the visitor; "not this one." "But that represents Augustus Cæsar, not Napoleon Bonaparte," is the answer. Whereupon the stranger, who, a moment before had very justly pronounced the resemblance to Bonaparte to be hardly perfect, exclaims, not less justly, What an amazing likeness to Napoleon! That sort of admiring surprise is intelligible, Had the bust histrionic and purely make-believe moderation of its master-and in truth its destroyer-by giving to one who had named himself Princeps the greater name of Augustus, the former title, like a left-off robe, too good to be thrown away, was carefully picked up, brushed into all its gloss, and appropriated by a second performer. We allude, of course, to Drusus Tiberius Claudius Nero, the future emperor, best known by his second name of Tiberius. The first and third names had belonged to his brother also. Tiberius was then "Prince and Cæsar," as the new slang of flattery termed him; he was stepson of Augustus and already adopted heir, solemnly designatus. He was verging upon the close of his fifty-third year of cautious profligacy, clandestine vindictiveness, and strictly-regulated vices. History has not accused him of murdering Agrippa Vespasianus ; |