all other argument whatever, which
hardens me against criticism, which supports me if I begin to despond, and
to which I ever come round, when the question of the possible and the
expedient is brought into discussion. It is the decision of the Holy See;
St. Peter has spoken, it is he who has enjoined that which seems to us so
unpromising. He has spoken, and has a claim on us to trust him. He is no
recluse, no solitary student, no dreamer about the past, no doter upon the
dead and gone, no projector of the visionary. He for eighteen hundred
years has lived in the world; he has seen all fortunes, he has encountered
all adversaries, he has shaped himself for all emergencies. If ever there
was a power on earth who had an eye for the times, who has confined
himself to the practicable, and has been happy in his anticipations, whose
words have been facts, and whose commands prophecies, such is he in the
history of ages, who sits from generation to generation in the Chair of
the Apostles, as the Vicar of Christ, and the Doctor of His Church.

6.

These are not the words of rhetoric, Gentlemen, but of history. All who
take part with the Apostle, are on the winning side. He has long since
given warrants for the confidence which he claims. From the first he has
looked through the wide world, of which he has the burden; and, according
to the need of the day, and the inspirations of his Lord, he has set
himself now to one thing, now to another; but to all in season, and to
nothing in vain. He came first upon an age of refinement and luxury like
our own, and, in spite of the persecutor, fertile in the resources of his
cruelty, he soon gathered, out of all classes of society, the slave, the
soldier, the high-born lady, and the sophist, materials enough to form a
people to his Master's honour. The savage hordes come down in torrents
from the north, and Peter went out to meet them, and by his very eye he
sobered them, and backed them in their full career. They turned aside and
flooded the whole earth, but only to be more surely civilized by him, and
to be made ten times more his children even than the older populations
which they had overwhelmed. Lawless kings arose, sagacious as the Roman,
passionate as the Hun, yet in him they found their match, and were
shattered, and he lived on. The gates of the earth were opened to the east
and west, and men poured out to take possession; but he went with them by
his missionaries, to China,