tic priests wave the ill-omen'd cross
O'er the unhappy earth; then shone the sun
On showers of gore from the upflashing steel
Of safe assassination, and all crime
Made stingless by the spirits of the Lord.
And blood-red rainbows canopied the land.
Spirit! no year of my eventful being
Has pass'd unstain'd by crime and misery,
Which flows from God's own faith. I've marked his slaves
With tongues whose lies are venomous, beguile
The insensate mob, and whilst one hand was red
With murder, feign to stretch the other out
For brotherhood and peace; and that they now
Babble of love and mercy, whilst their deeds
Are marked with all the narrowness and crime
That freedom's young arm dare not yet chastise?"

Protestant Christians may urge that all this is not Christianity; if
it be not--for it is the record of the Church--I would ask, what is?
and where shall we find the history of Christianity for the fifteen
centuries before Luther's time? and where, to-day? Their predecessors
plucked the plumage from the dying bird of mythology, as they,
themselves, have robbed the liberal orchard of all its choicest fruits
and palmed them off as of their own growth. Protestants would not, I
dare say, now countenance the persecutions of the past, but yet, I
would tell them that their Protestantism has been a great mistake; and
that, at this moment, there is no unity among the opposers of
Catholicism, who are split into a thousand sects, wrangling for
superiority, like wolves over offal; and that their churches are
gradually converging toward Rationalism on the one hand, and Catholic
Sacerdotalism on the other; in regard to which last, the Historical
Roman Church--the only Christian body which presents a solid
phalanx--one must not be too iconoclastic, remembering that, in the
monastic houses and great ecclesiastical libraries we have had
conserved for us, although, perchance by accident, the records of all
the philosophy, all the jurisprudence, all the polity, all the
literature, and all the civilization of ancient Greece and Rome, that
remained from the Alexandrian library and pre-Christian times--the
mediaeval clerics were the great conservators of knowledge, which we
inherit directly from Europe; and we should be, therefore, grateful to
them equally with Mohammedanism, from which we received, through the
Crusaders and the Moors, the basis of nearly all science and