to Mexico, carried along by zeal and charity,
as far as those children of men were led by enterprise, covetousness, or
ambition. Has he failed in his successes up to this hour? Did he, in our
fathers' day, fail in his struggle with Joseph of Germany and his
confederates, with Napoleon, a greater name, and his dependent kings,
that, though in another kind of fight, he should fail in ours? What grey
hairs are on the head of Judah, whose youth is renewed like the eagle's,
whose feet are like the feet of harts, and underneath the Everlasting
arms?

In the first centuries of the Church all this practical sagacity of Holy
Church was mere matter of faith, but every age, as it has come, has
confirmed faith by actual sight; and shame on us, if, with the accumulated
testimony of eighteen centuries, our eyes are too gross to see those
victories which the Saints have ever seen by anticipation. Least of all
can we, the Catholics of islands which have in the cultivation and
diffusion of Knowledge heretofore been so singularly united under the
auspices of the Apostolic See, least of all can we be the men to distrust
its wisdom and to predict its failure, when it sends us on a similar
mission now. I cannot forget that, at a time when Celt and Saxon were
alike savage, it was the See of Peter that gave both of them, first faith,
then civilization; and then again bound them together in one by the seal
of a joint commission to convert and illuminate in their turn the pagan
continent. I cannot forget how it was from Rome that the glorious St.
Patrick was sent to Ireland, and did a work so great that he could not
have a successor in it, the sanctity and learning and zeal and charity
which followed on his death being but the result of the one impulse which
he gave. I cannot forget how, in no long time, under the fostering breath
of the Vicar of Christ, a country of heathen superstitions became the very
wonder and asylum of all people,--the wonder by reason of its knowledge,
sacred and profane, and the asylum of religion, literature and science,
when chased away from the continent by the barbarian invaders. I recollect
its hospitality, freely accorded to the pilgrim; its volumes munificently
presented to the foreign student; and the prayers, the blessings, the holy
rites, the solemn chants, which sanctified the while both giver and
receiver.

Nor can I forget either, how my own England had meanwhile become the
solicitude of the same unwearied