the ruined temple, or the broken arch, or the silent amphitheatre, or the deserted bath. Countless as are the works which her glories have inspired, yet we never weary of the subject. History and poetry, and art have found in Rome the richest of their treasure-houses; yet her resources have never been exhausted, and the latest pilgrim to her shrines can still draw forth from her secret chambers "old things and new." Goethe has said that Rome is a world in itself, apart from the material world, and that without Rome the world would be a desert. But this charm of the mere natural order she shares in common, although to a far higher degree, with Athens, and Babylon, and Nineveh, and other great cities which have left their mark upon the history of man. It is, as M. Veuillot remarks (the title of whose beautiful work we have prefixed to this article), but the "coarse outer covering " which surrounds her, and which affects the natural man. The true Rome lies beneath that Rome whose greatness has never passed away; not "childless and crownless" (as the poet sings), but who is still the crowned mistress of the world, the Rome of our souls and of our hearts, the Rome of the Vicars of the Son of Mary, the throne of S. Peter, the city of the Living God, and the Mother of Mankind!

Who would ever speak of Rome (says M. Veuillot) in the same careless way as he might speak of Berlin, or London, or even Paris? Rome must always excite either immense hatred or immense love, and remain without an equal in the eyes of men. Rome triumphant, the mistress of the nations! She rules either for God or for Satan, but rule she must. At one time she has her foot upon the world, and crushes it; at another she lifts up the world and raises it to God.

It is Rome who has subjected the earth to herself, and fed upon the flesh and blood of mankind. It is Rome who has taken the human race in her arms, like a sick child, and made it to breathe the pure air of the mountains of God, and nourished it with the Flesh and Blood of Jesus Christ, the Living God.

When I saw Rome for the first time, before even I knew that I brought nothing into it but death, and still farther off from the knowledge that I should find in it life; without as yet knowing anything either of death or life, but moved by a higher instinct than my own; when, I say, I saw this august Rome, and had breathed her indefinable fragrance, then I knew that love was within my power and within my reach.

What, then, was this fragrance which penetrated my soul without passing through my senses; which, while it seemed within me to be both a language and a light, seemed also to close my eyes and my ears to all that was going on around me?

This fragrance was as it were a vesture of God, which, while it concealed Him, bore witness to His presence; and I followed upon the traces of this

fragrance without knowing what it was, hesitating, and yet overpowered; and I went out of the way in which I had hitherto walked to follow it, and soon I came to know that it was a real language that I had heard. It was the language of Rome, and at the same time the Word of God. And in this fragrance, and language, and light, I found what I had not looked for and had never known,God, Rome, and myself.*

Never, perhaps, has this fragrance of Rome, this "odour of sweetness," this "good odour" of Christ been more sensible, this "vesture of God" more visible, than in these days in which we live. Happy they who can inhale this fragrance, happy the eyes which can see God's presence in eternal Rome; for even if not within the threshold, they are already within the outer court of " that old Church which is before all time and which will fill all time, and after all time will still live on to fill eternity." Most happy they who not only see and feel it, but who realize and understand it, for they have already entered the inner courts and the Holy Place of the "Temple not made with hands." Never, perhaps, has there been a time when the language of Rome has been so divine, or when she has spoken to us so much or so grandly about God. Never has there been a time when Rome has stood out more clearly among the cities of the world in her sublime mission of evangelist of the nations, and maintainer of the principles of eternal justice; for it is there alone that the Gospel of Christ, which, if not openly rejected, is at least disregarded and insulted by the rulers and governments of the world, may be said to be still enthroned, and that its principles and laws are still observed in all their plenitude. In these our days, when governments have ceased to be distinctly and outwardly Christian, and have separated themselves from the Church, and cut themselves off from her influencewhen the faith and law of Christ are no longer the basis of politics or the groundwork of national constitutions,Rome is the only witness left in all the world to the great truth, that He who "has washed us from our sins" is also the "Prince of the kings of the earth.” It is from Rome alone that the voice of warning has gone forth to the nations, telling them of the danger of the gulf which lies beneath them, and into which they must too surely fall at last, if, trusting to their own strength and wisdom, they think themselves sufficient for themselves, and reject her guiding hand, who is herself the mother of the nations and the life of the world. Loud, and angry, and scornful was the outcry with which the

* Vol. i. pp. 2-9.

Syllabus of Pius IX. was received by men; but generations yet unborn may live to date their salvation from that eventful Act, and to bless the Pontiff whom God has raised up to recall the world from its downward course to ruin into the "old

paths and the good way" which lead to life. At the present moment (we can say it without exaggeration), Rome is the one city of the world which is ruled entirely by the law of Christ, the one spot of earth which is still true to the responsibilities of the "Faith which was once delivered to the Saints." In Rome even the stones cry out; and the obelisk of the Vatican, in front of the threshold of the Apostles, whose shadow perhaps may have fallen upon Mary's exiled child as He entered the land of Egypt, and made the idols to fall upon their faces, tells no lie to heaven when it proclaims that in Rome at least Christ has conquered, and reigns and rules. Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus regit! Vicit Leo de tribu Juda! And yet there are men who would take away this little spot of earth from Christ, this remnant of His vineyard, this one loyal city of the Cross; who would throw down the throne of the Vicar of the King of kings, and tear away the crown from his brow in order to satisfy the cravings of a false and narrow nationalism which is ever at variance with the Catholicity of Christ's kingdom upon earth, and to build upon the ruins of the Apostolic throne the godless government and corrupt civilization of an age which is too wrapt in itself to remember God, too jealous of its own interests to respect those of Christ, and thus to complete the guilt and ruin of a well-nigh apostate world! Multiply all the real and undoubted abuses of the temporal sovereignty as you will; add to them all the calumnies which have been heaped upon the Government of the Holy See by the traitors who have betrayed it, or the enemies who have belied it; suppose them to be as true as we know them to be false, and we still maintain that to destroy or even to weaken the throne of Peter would be to destroy and weaken the foundations of all authority upon earth; for, alone among the thrones of the world, it rests upon the eternal principle that Christ "is the King of kings and Lord of lords."

And shall God suffer this to be? If so, then are we already at the " beginning of sorrows," and our hearts may well fail us for fear of those things that are coming upon the earth; for then assuredly the day is at hand of which our Lord has said: "When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find, think you, faith on earth?" And yet how often in the history of the Papacy have there been foreshadowings of Anti-Christ and of the last woes, and still their fulfilment has been mercifully delayed?

S. Gregory the Great thought in his day that the last hour had come. All the world was in ruin; pestilence, and earthquake, and famine, were busy at their work. His own soul (says M. Veuillot *) seemed to be the only healthy thing belonging to mankind. Yet Gregory may be almost said to be the founder of Christian Europe, and the end was not yet. What has been may be again. God may have yet higher destinies in store for the race of man. Rather let us believe that although governments have ceased to be Christian, and society has divorced herself from the ties which bound her to the Church, the Gospel, which at the beginning went forth from Rome to the ends of the earth, has but gathered itself back again into the citadel of its strength, and that it is waiting there in patience, keeping justice alive in the world (and liberty, too, if men would only know it), until the present phase of Christendom, with its idolatry of gold and its revival of Pagan luxury, shall have melted away, when it will again issue forth in streams of light and true civilization to replenish the face of the earth, and make all things new.

Many are the ways in which Rome speaks to us of God, and proclaims herself His city, and in which the fragrance of His presence, which, like the incense of her churches, clings to her walls, and cannot be dispersed, becomes sensible to our notice.

One of the first things which strike and almost startle a visitor to Rome, is to find how familiarly the realities of faith and the mysteries of the unseen world enter into the course of men's daily life. At Rome God seems to take the first place in the thoughts of men, and the world the second; and (unlike, indeed, what is to be seen in other cities of the world) men really take Christ at His blessed word, and seek first the kingdom of God and its justice, believing, because He has said it, that "all other things shall be added unto them." How entirely has modern society banished from itself the idea of the supernatural, and of the world to come! It has no higher life than that of this world. The world is its God, and to succeed in it is its religion. It has lost all idea of Christ's kingdom, and grows angry and indignant if we say that Christ has any rights or any interests in this world, or fretful and impatient whenever it comes across the Church. Ever anxious that the Church should be kept within her own sphere, it has no scruple about tyrannizing over her, and usurping her prerogatives; so it substitutes the interests of the nationalities of this world for the glorious liberties of the

* Vol. i. p. 122.

Church of God. It deprives the Church of every influence, and seeks thus to banish God from the world. Even when it is seized with a fit of liberality, and talks to us of a "free Church in a free State," it only means that the liberty is to be all on one side, and in favour of the State; for it will not hear of the Church having any laws which may interfere with its own liberty, or lie out of its power to abrogate. And yet, unless God is really to be banished from His own world, His Church, through which He speaks, ought surely to have a directing voice in every province of human thought and action. Modern society lives for this world, labours for this world, sins for this world. It brings up its children for this world alone, by teaching them that the one great thing they have to learn is to succeed in this life, rather than so to live that one day they may be made citizens of that "city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God." Oh, how the angels must weep at that mockery of teaching which we call modern education! and what a lifting up of hands by children against their parents will there be at the last day before the great white throne, for having taught them to place this world before the next, and to risk eternity for time, and (oh, the madness!) for having not taught them the one thing for which they were sent into the world. In a word, men give their health, and wealth, and strength, and time to this world. They spend and are spent in the service of temporal things rather than of those which are eternal.

But at Rome the opposite of all this is witnessed. We have already seen how the kingdom of Christ, with its laws and principles, are regarded at Rome as the foundation of the government of the State. The same may now be said with regard to that of the family. To live and act upon higher principles than those of this world seems there to be the rule rather than the exception. Men seem to believe, and to act upon the belief, that they have not been sent into the world merely to make it better, or richer, or more powerful, or even happier than it is; although at the same time (as we said above) they seem to know that zeal for the kingdom of God will really make the world happier, and better, and richer, and more powerful, in accordance with His promise Whose Word can never pass away. And so religion at Rome is not an external thing which may be put off or on, and which sometimes does not fit; but it enters into men's being, and into the actions of their daily and even hourly life.

Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the education of the Roman youth. All who have lived for any length of time in Rome, who have mixed in its society, and have become