e the orthodoxy and piety of its administrators are
deemed a substitute for a better system. The demand for a really
Catholic system of government falls with the greatest weight of reproach
on the Catholic States.

Yet it is important to remember that in the ages of faith the same unity
prevailed in political ideas, and that the civil as well as the
religious troubles of our time are in great measure due to the
Reformation. It is common to advise Catholics to make up their minds to
accept the political doctrines of the day; but it would be more to the
purpose to recall the ideas of Catholic times. It is not in the results
of the political development of the last three centuries that the Church
can place her trust; neither in absolute monarchy, nor in the
revolutionary liberalism, nor in the infallible constitutional scheme.
She must create anew or revive her former creations, and instil a new
life and spirit into those remains of the mediaeval system which will
bear the mark of the ages when heresy and unbelief, Roman law, and
heathen philosophy, had not obscured the idea of the Christian State.
These remains are to be found, in various stages of decay, in every
State,--with the exception, perhaps, of France,--that grew out of the
mediaeval civilisation. Above all they will be found in the country
which, in the midst of its apostasy, and in spite of so much guilt
towards religion, has preserved the Catholic forms in its Church
establishment more than any other Protestant nation, and the Catholic
spirit in her political institutions more than any Catholic nation. To
renew the memory of the times in which this spirit prevailed in Europe,
and to preserve the remains of it, to promote the knowledge of what is
lost, and the desire of what is most urgently needed,--is an important
service and an important duty which it behoves us to perform. We are
greatly mistaken if these are not reflections which force themselves on
every one who carefully observes the political history of the Church in
modern Europe.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 300: _The Rambler_, 1858.]

[Footnote 301: Tertullian, _Apologeticum_, 39; see also 30, 32. "We pray
also for the emperors, for the ministers of their Government, for the
State, for the peace of the world, for the delay of the last day."]

[Footnote 302: _De Civil. Dei_, xv. 5. "The fratricide was the first
founder of the secular State."]

[Footnote 303: "The Church reckons her subjects not as he