utary restraints, as the
indignant uprising of a misgoverned people against a civil despotism
that affected injuriously all orders, ranks and conditions of society.
The sovereigns had taken good care that an attack on them should involve
an attack on religion, and to have it deeply impressed on their subjects
that resistance to them was rebellion against God. The priest, who
should have labored publicly to correct the issue made up by the
sovereigns in accord with unbelievers, would have promoted sedition, and
done more harm than good; besides, he would have been at once reduced to
silence, in some one of the many ways despotism has usually at its
command.

The horrors of the French Revolution, the universal breaking up of
society it involved, the persecution of the Church and of her clergy,
and her religious, which it shamelessly introduced in the name of
liberty, the ruthless war it waged upon religion, virtue, all that wise
and good men hold sacred, not unnaturally, to say the least, tended to
create in the minds of the clergy and the people, who remained firm in
their faith, and justly regarded religion as the first want of man and
society, a deeper distrust of the practicability of liberty, and a
deeper horror of all movements attempted in its name. This, again, as
naturally tended to alienate the party clamoring for political and
social reform still more from Catholicity; which, in its turn, has
reacted with new force on the Catholic party, and made them still more
determined in their anti-liberal convictions and efforts. These
tendencies, on both sides, have been aggravated by the European
revolutions and repressions, till now almost everywhere the lines are
well defined, and the so-called Liberals are, almost to a man, bitterly
anti-Catholic, and the sovereigns seem to have succeeded in forcing the
issue: The Church and Caesarism, or Liberty and Infidelity.

Certainly, as religion is of the highest necessity to man and society,
infinitely more important than political freedom and social well-being,
I am unable to conceive how the Catholic party, under the circumstances,
could well have acted differently. Their error was in their want of
vigilance and sagacity in the beginning, in suffering the political
Caesarism to revive and consolidate itself in the State, or the
sovereigns, in the outset, to force upon the Catholic world so false an
issue, or to place them in so unnatural and so embarrassing a position.
Th