of souls, framed to his divine image, and the price of his adorable
blood. The church of Christ is his spiritual kingdom: he is not only the
architect and founder, but continues to govern it, and by his spirit to
animate its members to the end of the world as its invisible head:
though he has left in St. Peter and his successors a vicar, or
lieutenant, as a visible head, with an established hierarchy for its
exterior government. If we love him and desire his honor, if we love men
on so many titles linked with us, can we cease weeping and praying, that
by his sweet omnipotent grace he subdue all the enemies of his church,
converting to it all infidels and apostates? In its very bosom sinners
fight against him. Though these continue his members by faith, they are
dead members, because he lives not in them by his grace and charity,
reigns not in their hearts, animates them not with his spirit. He will
indeed always live by grace and sanctity in many members of his mystical
body. Let us pray that by the destruction of the tyranny of sin all
souls may subject themselves to the reign of his holy love. Good Jesus!
for your mercy's sake, hear me in this above all other petitions: never
suffer me to be separated from you by forfeiting your holy love: may I
remain always _rooted and grounded in your charity_, as is the will of
your Father. Eph. iii.

Footnotes:
1. Chron. and Hist., l. 3, c. 30.
2. Hom. 6, in Luc.
3. In Catal. c. 1.
4. Ep. 18, t. 2, Conc. p. 1269.
5. Conc. t. 4, p. 1262.
6. Ep. 40, l. 7, t. 2, p. 888, Ed. Ben.
7. Some have imagined that the feast of the chair of St. Peter was not
known, at least in Africa, because it occurs not in the ancient
calendar of Carthage. But how should the eighth day before the
calends of March now appear in it, since the part is lost from the
fourteenth before the calends of March to the eleventh before the
calends of May? Hence St. Pontius, deacon and martyr, on the eighth
before the Ides of March; St. Donatus, and some other African
martyrs are not there found. At least it is certain that it was kept
at Rome long before that time. St. Leo preached a sermon on St.
Peter's chair, (Serm. 100, t. 1, p. 285, ad. Rom.) Quesnel denied it
to be genuine in his first edition; but in the second at Lyons, to
1700, he corrected this mistake, and proved this sermon to be St.
Leo's; which is more fully demonstrated by Cacciari in his late