ined front which the
Holy See has ever made against it.

4.

The Catholic Church was in the first instance a wanderer on the earth,
and had nothing to attach her to its soil; but no sooner did persecution
cease, and territory was allowed to her, than she began to exert a
beneficent influence upon the face of the land, and on its cultivators.
She shed her consolations, and extended her protection, over the serf
and the slave; and, while she gradually relaxed his fetters, she sent
her own dearest children to bear his burden with him, and to aid him in
the cultivation of the soil. Under the loving assiduity of the
Benedictine Monk, the ravages of war were repaired, the plantation
throve, the river diffused itself in rills and channels, and hill and
dale and plain rejoiced in corn land and pasture. And when in a later
time a world was to be created, not restored, when the deep forests of
the North were to be cleared, and the unwholesome marsh to be drained,
who but the missionaries from the same great Order were to be the
ministers of temporal, as well as spiritual, benefits to the rude tribes
they were converting? And then again, when history moved on into the era
of the first Turkish outbreak, who but St. Bernard, the very preacher of
the Crusade, who but he led on his peaceful Cistercians, after the
pattern of his master, St. Stephen, to that laborious but cheerful
husbandry, which they continue in the wild places of the earth even to
this day? Never has Holy Church forgotten,--abhorrent, as she is, from
the Pantheistic tendencies which in all ages have surrounded her,--never
has she forgotten the interests of that mighty mother on whose bosom we
feed in life, into whose arms we drop in death; never has she forgotten
that that mother is the special creature of God, and to be honoured, in
leaf and flower, in lofty tree and pleasant stream, for His sake, as
well as for our own; that while it is our primeval penalty to till the
earth, she lovingly repays us for our toil; that Adam was a gardener
even in Paradise, and that Noe inaugurated his new world by "beginning
to be a husbandman, and by planting a vineyard."

Such is the genius of the true faith; and it might have been thought,
that, though not Christians, even of very gratitude, the barbarous race,
which owed a part of whatever improvement of mind or manners they had
received to the fair plains of Sogdiana, would, on seizing on their rich
and beautiful lands on t