nworthy in days
of great stress and sore trial to take up and carry forward the work of
his friend and teacher and predecessor, Hildebrand. One need not be a
Catholic to recognise the debt of mankind to Gregory VII., of whom,
dying in exile and in seeming defeat at Salerno, Sir James Stephen has
truly said that he has 'left the impress of his gigantic character upon
all succeeding ages.' One need only be a moderately civilised man of
common sense to recognise the debt of mankind to Odo de Chatillon, known
in the pontificate as Urban II. Wherever in the world the evensong of
the Angelus breathes peace on earth to men of good-will, it speaks of
the great pontiff and of the Truce of God which he founded, that the
races of Christian Europe, suspending their internecine strife, might
unite to roll back into Asia once for all the threatening invasion of
Islam.

But the thousands upon thousands of people of both sexes and of all
conditions in life who filled the vast plateau of Chatillon on that
summer day in July 1887, and hailed with tumultuous shouts the monument
of this great Frenchman and great Pope, visibly took a more than
historic interest in the occasion. They were moved not only by those
'mystic chords of memory' of which President Lincoln knew the social and
political value much better than the French fanatics of 'moral unity,'
but by a vivid consciousness of the present peril of their country,
their homes and their faith. Once more, as in the eleventh century and
in the eighteenth, France needs to-day 'an invincible champion of the
freedom of the Church, a defender of public peace, a reformer of morals,
a scourge of corruption.'

This was the true significance of this memorable scene in the Marne. It
was in the minds of that whole multitude, and it stirred them all with a
common impulse when the eloquent Bishop of Angers, after sketching in a
bold and striking outline the career of Urban II., thus drove its lesson
home:--'Urban II. and the Popes of the Middle Ages have made for
evermore impossible any return to the pagan theory of the omnipotence of
the State. Ah, no doubt, despite that signal defeat, despotism will
return to the charge. More than once in the course of the ages we shall
see fresh appeals to violence against a power which can defend itself
only by appealing to moral authority. We shall see, as we saw under
Henry of Germany, emperors, kings, and republics strive to forge chains
for the Church by th