he century, two political
enemies of whom neither felt the slightest personal rancour against the
other. On his death-bed, the King earnestly desired the Pope's parting
blessing, but although the Pope gave it, the message arrived too late,
for the old King was dead. Little more than a month later, Pius the
Ninth departed this life. That was the end of the old era.

The disposition of Europe in the year 1878, when Leo the Thirteenth was
crowned, was strongly anti-Catholic. England had reached the height of
her power and influence, and represented to the world the
scientific-practical idea in its most successful form. She was then
traversing that intellectual phase of so-called scientific atheism of
which Huxley and Herbert Spencer were the chief teachers. Their view
seems not to have been so hostile to the Catholic Church in particular
as it was distinctly antagonistic to all religion whatsoever. People
were inclined to believe that all creeds were a thing of the past, and
that a scientific millennium was at hand. No one who lived in those days
can forget the weary air of pity with which the Huxleyites and the
Spencerians spoke of all humanity's beliefs. England's enormous
political power somehow lent weight to the anti-religious theories of
those two leading men of science, which never really had the slightest
hold upon the believing English people. Italians, for instance, readily
asserted that England had attained her position among nations by the
practice of scientific atheism, and classed Darwin the discoverer with
Spencer the destroyer; for all Latins are more or less born
Anglomaniacs, and naturally envy and imitate Anglo-Saxon character, even
while finding fault with them, just as we envy and imitate Latin art and
fashions. Under a German dynasty and a Prime Minister of Israelitish
name and extraction, the English had become the ideal after which half
of Europe hankered in vain. England's influence was then distinctly
anti-Catholic.

Germany, fresh in unity, and still quivering with the long-forgotten
delight of conquest, was also, as an Empire, anti-Catholic, and the
Kultur Kampf, which was really a religious struggle, was at its height.
Germany's religions are official at the one extreme and popular at the
other; but there is no intermediate religion to speak of--and what we
should call cultured people, scientific men, the professorial class, are
largely atheistic.

For some time after the proclamation of the