honourable,
since the Lord leaned his head to the right when he died on the
Cross. The ladies of the aristocracy, and among them Countess Clena,
Viscountess Olive, and Princess des Boscenos, occupied reserved seats.
In the immense building and in the square outside were gathered twenty
thousand clergy of all sorts, as well as thirty thousand of the laity.

After the expiatory and propitiatory ceremony the Reverend Father
Douillard ascended the pulpit. The sermon had at first been entrusted to
the Reverend Father Agaric, but, in spite of his merits, he was thought
unequal to the occasion in zeal and doctrine, and the eloquent Capuchin
friar, who for six months had gone through the barracks preaching
against the enemies of God and authority, had been chosen in his place.

The Reverend Father Douillard, taking as his text, "He hath put down the
mighty from their seat," established that all temporal power has God as
its principle and its end, and that it is ruined and destroyed when it
turns aside from the path that Providence has traced out for it and from
the end to which He has directed it.

Applying these sacred rules to the government of Penguinia, he drew a
terrible picture of the evils that the country's rulers had been unable
either to prevent or to foresee.

"The first author of all these miseries and degradations, my brethren,"
said he, "is only too well known to you. He is a monster whose destiny
is providentially proclaimed by his name, for it is derived from the
Greek word, pyros, which means fire. Eternal wisdom warns us by this
etymology that a Jew was to set ablaze the country that had welcomed
him."

He depicted the country, persecuted by the persecutors of the Church,
and crying in its agony:

"O woe! O glory! Those who have crucified my God are crucifying me!"

At these words a prolonged shudder passed through the assembly.

The powerful orator excited still greater indignation when he described
the proud and crime-stained Colomban, plunged into the stream, all
the waters of which could not cleanse him. He gathered up all the
humiliations and all the perils of the Penguins in order to reproach the
President of the Republic and his Prime Minister with them.

"That Minister," said he, "having been guilty of degrading cowardice
in not exterminating the seven hundred Pyrotists with their allies and
defenders, as Saul exterminated the Philistines at Gibeah, has rendered
himself unworthy of exercisin