Part 2 — THE CARESSES OF PROVIDENCE. FROM LA CIVILTA CATTOLICA.

Very recently, the Liberal Italian party, finding that their Catholic opponents were in no wise damaged by arguments drawn from a denial of God’s concern in human affairs, has changed its tactics, and proposes now to convert us clericals by appeals to our religious sensibilities. We are assaulted by a theological attack ad hominem, which they tell us is so conclusive that, if we do not acknowledge ourselves beaten, it is because we have lost our reason and renounced the faith.

“You believe,” say they, “in the providence of God. You recognize his hand in all the events of life, and you profess to bless and bow to the divine decrees. Well, then, Providence, you perceive, has smiled graciously on us and on our work—a work which you execrate and detest. Providence is plainly on our side. He declares himself for us and against you. Submit, then, to his decrees. Lay aside this idle expectation of the triumph of your cause, which is evidently opposed to the holy will of God. Accept accomplished facts. Reconcile yourselves with Italy, our glorious new kingdom, and cease, amid your noisy professions of religion, to rebel against the will of the Most High.”

Such in its naked substance is the argument to which the Liberals now exultingly resort; more especially since the breach of Porta Pia and the successful picking of the locks of the Quirinal. They hope in this way to convict us of apostasy from the faith, and (what they deem still more atrocious) of an unpardonable outrage against the laws of “the human understanding.”

“It seems incredible,” they go on to say, “that, after such positive proofs of a special protection vouchsafed by Providence to regenerate Italy, the clerical party should cling so stubbornly to the hope of a resuscitation of the past—a past which, were it not already irrevocably condemned by the logic of events, would be condemned by their own theory of an all-seeing and all-wise God.” This is the language in which the Jewish journal L’Opinione, after taking Roman ground at the close of the year just elapsed, expressed this very formidable argument. They had already uttered it some hundred times before. Many sheets of less importance had got up an industrious echo to this cry; and one in particular, a petty Florentine print, undertakes to celebrate the new year by magnifying “the caresses of Providence” bestowed upon the little darling angel, Italy, born, as everybody knows, of the wonderful shrewdness of the Italian people and their undying love of liberty—a liberty, by the way, which never fails to exemplify itself by a free and strenuous appropriation of a weaker neighbor’s earthly goods. Strange indeed it is that men, who never were known as professed believers in any other divinity than Mammon, should now, after having derided for years, and with every mark of blasphemous scorn, “the finger of God,” suddenly assume the office of apostles of a new idea of Christian Providence. Strange it is that only now, after the plunder of a city gained by battering down walls and picking locks with forged keys—that these men, we say, should chant the praises of the God they had defied, and defend his holy decrees against the “scandalous negations” of the Catholic Church. Strangest is it of all, that the prince of these extraordinary apostles should be no other than the so-called Jew proprietor of the Opinione—who is not even a Jew; for he has always shown that he believes as little of the Old Testament as he does of the New.

But—

Solid or not, this argumentum ad hominem has for a certain class of minds an air of great plausibility. At all events, it might be well to look into it a little; for we may thereby throw some light upon several important truths which nowadays need special illumination. We let in the argument, therefore, as the new Jewish and infidel philosophers present it; and we propose to give them, in a nutshell, the proper answer to it. They will then understand why Catholics not only refuse to surrender to this showing, but, on the contrary, see in it reason to stand firm to their first faith, and to cherish unceasing hopes of the speedy triumph of their cause.

Yes, gentlemen, we Catholics believe, with all our heart and soul, in the holy providence of God. In this Providence we recognize the origin and order of all created things. We make it indeed our glory that we bless and humbly worship its adorable decrees. We confess, therefore, without reserve, that what you choose to call its “loving caresses” are really yours by divine appointment; and the very decree which to you is the source of so much joy, and to us of so much mourning, we adore as the undoubted manifestation of his most holy will. All this we freely admit as truth, as unquestionable, unanswerable truth. But while, in these explicit terms, we confess this Catholic verity, we deny, in equally explicit terms, that what you choose to call “caresses” are in any sense such to you, or that the palpable proofs of that “special protection” of which you make so vain a boast are proofs of anything but the very opposite; nay, so false is it, that the caresses you claim are marks of divine approval, that the very assertion is a blasphemy most insulting to the sovereign providence of God. To prove these propositions is an easy thing to any one who knows his catechism; and the understanding of them easier still to any one who believes as well as knows. To him who either does not know his Christian primer, or, knowing it, will not believe, they may seem incapable of either proof or comprehension. Should such a case present itself, the fault is certainly not ours. A poet tells us that:

If so, why is it that this Jew, instead of sticking like a worthy Hebrew to his stock-list, takes to teaching us the Christian catechism? And why is it that this worshipper of Voltaire, instead of chanting hymns to Venus, reads us a lecture on what he knows about the purposes of God? Sutor ne ultra crepidam.

Nevertheless, we proceed to explain the propositions advanced above.

Catholics acknowledge that every event, be it favorable or unfavorable to their prayers, is consistent with the providence of God. To Providence they refer evil as well as good, with this difference, that good and unblamable evil they ascribe to the decrees of his sovereign direction, but blamable evil they ascribe to his permissive decree. In a word, they believe and confess that God wills positively all that comes to pass without taint of moral evil, and wills negatively (that is, he does not preclude) what comes to pass so tainted by cause of man’s abuse of his free-will. They nevertheless hold and profess that whatever evil he permits, that also is ordained to good; so that nothing enters into those most just and wise decrees that does not aim effectively at the final design of the creation and redemption of mankind; which design in this life is the church militant, and, in the next, the church triumphant, the central point of his extrinsic glorification.

The reason, then, that Catholics hold and profess that God does not and cannot decree, otherwise than permissively, moral evil—that is, disobedience, injustice, or briefly sin—is that he neither participates nor can participate in evil of this nature which is essentially opposed to his infinite sanctity. He would, in fact, participate therein if he willed it positively and not merely negatively; whereas, permitting it only, he in no wise participates, though he allows man, whom he had created free, to make an evil use of the gift of liberty. He does not hinder him, because neither is he so obliged, nor can the divine hindrance of human freedom be exacted by the nature of man left free. With all this, God is in no wise the less able to secure for himself, always and in every case and from every human being, the external glory which he reserved to himself when he created man. Because, he who shall not glorify in heaven an infinite mercy granted to the good use of the free-will, shall glorify in hell an infinite justice merited by the abuse of this same free-will. Hence the Almighty will not be shorn of the least shadow of that glory, for which, among other things, he drew man out of the abyss of nothingness.

Catholics, moreover, believe and confess that the effects of moral evil are invariably directed by Almighty God to the good of mankind. They serve to punish in order to amend, or else to exercise in order to confirm. St. Augustine remarks, with his usual perspicacity, that the life of a bad man is often prolonged not only to afford an opportunity for his amendment, but to serve as an occasion of sanctification to the good. Ne putetis gratis esse malos in hoc mundo, et nihil boni de eis agere Deum. Omnis malus aut ideo vivit ut corrigatur, aut ideo vivit ut per illum bonus exerceatur.[62]

Hence it is that Catholics, in all emergencies, even in the most calamitous, nay, even in those caused by the worst iniquities of unscrupulous men, do not fail to adore the goodness and justice of Almighty God, and to acknowledge the inscrutable dispositions of his most holy will. But they never think of imputing to him the sins and transgressions of the wicked. These he neither wills nor is he capable of willing them. He permits them only as subserving his mercy or his justice.

It follows, then, that, in order to decide whether the easy successes of certain definite transactions are successes due to divine approbation, and palpable proofs of his gracious protection, or whether rather they are not facilities that Providence permits for the punishment of the wicked and for the chastening of the virtuously minded, it is essential to see first whether these definite acts are right or wrong, meritorious or sinful; that is, conformable or unconformable to the law of eternal justice, and to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now, certain it is that in those transactions which the enemies of Christ regard as sanctioned by the manifest “caresses” of Almighty God, Catholic Christians see nothing but acts of iniquity and sin; and accordingly, while they accept them as permitted by God for reasons and results full of justice and mercy, they nevertheless esteem it the height of blasphemy to look upon such outrages, however successful for the moment, as “caresses” bestowed by Providence upon the very men who at other times deny his existence or treat his word with open scorn and contempt.

We have thus, as briefly and as lucidly as we could, and with the Christian catechism for our guide, explained to these Jews who are no Jews, and to these philosophers who are no philosophers, the sense of the propositions we affirm.

Perhaps they will now require of us to prove that the acts referred to are acts of iniquity and sin. This is very much like asking us to prove that the sun is shining, when it is evidently blazing at mid-day. We let pass that the highest authority on earth has pronounced, again and again, that the acts are simply acts most sinful and sacrilegious. We let pass that the concurrent testimony of all minds endowed with natural rectitude of judgment (not excluding Protestants nor Israelites nor Turks) has confirmed and reconfirmed the condemnations spoken already by Pope, by church, and by the entire Catholic world. It is enough that the authors and prime movers of these outrages proclaimed and stamped them as dishonorable and base before they perpetrated them, and even in the very act of their perpetration. Can these apostolic gentlemen, now so anxious for the conversion of the Catholic Church, be ignorant, for instance, that two of the Subalpine ministry, Visconti-Venosta and Lanza, declared the invasion of Rome and the usurpation of the Papal power acts of barbarism destitute of every semblance of right? And are they not aware that they so avouched just one short month before both invasion and usurpation were consummated by burglary and breach?

Who can hope, then, to persuade a Catholic that these successful shells, pick-locks, and jimmies have not been instruments of the most iniquitous wrong-doing, seeing that these two men, in the face of heaven and earth, averred its baseness themselves only a few weeks before the formal consummation of the act? Perhaps, too, our converters have never heard how their divine Camillo Cavour said one day to their other divine Massimo d’Azeglio, who has recorded it ad perpetuam rei memoriam: “If what we are doing for Italy, you and I had done for ourselves, what a precious pair of big balossi we should have been!” The Opinione knows too well the sense of the Subalpine word balosso that we should put it into good Italian. The editor and his pharisaical colleagues have learned, no doubt, the lovely dialect of the northern masters they have chosen for Italy and for themselves. They can teach us, we dare say, the full force of this fine word balosso; that it means all that is contained in the words scamp, scoundrel, robber, rascal, villain, ruffian, knave. Can Catholics, then, be easily persuaded that the facts accomplished by Azeglio and Cavour for the regeneration of Italy have been free from sin and iniquity, seeing that these two divines have stigmatized them as the acts of men bad enough to be balossi? For be it observed that Azeglio himself admits that what is criminal in private life is no less criminal in public;[63] showing (though we are losing time in the attempt to throw light upon the sun) that our apostolic friends, in order to justify the accomplished facts resorted to for Italy’s new birth, have been obliged to invent a modern social law the converse of the ancient one ordained by God himself.

If this be admitted, what can prove more incontestably that the acts complained of were acts of sin and iniquity; sin being any act contrary to God’s commands, and iniquity an act opposed to the justice he enjoins?

But Catholics may go further, and say to the apostles of our conversion that not only are the means used for the regeneration of Italy sinful and iniquitous, but that the end itself aimed at by the ringleaders of this pretended regeneration is absolutely antichristian and diabolical, being nothing less than the demolition of the Catholic Church and the annihilation of the kingdom of God among men. Of course, the end is simply absurd, and rendered impossible by the excess of its absurdity. But nevertheless, though it cannot exist as a thing attainable, it does exist as a thing conceivable, and as such inspires the mad career of Masonry, which pursues it with satanic rage and open ostentation as the main objective point of the machinations of the sect.

Mazzini, to whom the regenerators are indebted for their grand idea, aimed as far ago as 1834 at the abolition of the temporal power, without regard to cost. His argument was that the downfall of this power carried with it, as a necessary consequence, the emancipation of the human race from the thraldom of the spiritual power. “The Vicars of Christ” he called “Vicars of the Spirit of Evil, to be exterminated, never to be restored.”[64] Visconti-Venosta, a member of the present Italian cabinet, wrote to Mazzini, in 1851, that the rallying-cry of the regeneration should be, “Down with the Monarchy, down with the Papacy.”[65]

Ferrari, the philosopher of the movement, proclaimed in 1853 that the end it proposed was the stamping out of Pope and Emperor, of Christ and Cæsar; the four tyrannies that Machiavelli had delivered over to Italian hate.[66]

To make this matter short, though we might go on for ever, the more rabid partisans of the regeneration do not blush to say that the essential end of the great Italian movement is the emancipation of human consciences from the authority of the church, by laying prostrate the colossus against whom Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII. ineffectually strove. They aim, in a word, at the radical destruction of the entire Catholic Church; to which end, nationality, unity, political liberty itself, were always to be regarded as nothing more than the means.[67]

These preliminaries being understood, our free-thinking friends ought to see that their argument, derived from what they call “providential protection” to their sacrilegious acts, strikes the Catholic mind as a shocking blasphemy, because it makes our blessed Lord an accomplice in detestable transactions, and an instigator to the worst of crimes—a deliberate plotter, in short, of the ruin of that church which is the masterpiece of his wisdom, and the object of his infinite love. We have no objections to their saying that the anger of God has unchained their barbarous allies, and for a time has left them free to do their worst against the children of the church. They may say all this, and Catholics will assent and even approve—not the animus, but the words. They will exclaim with St. Jerome of old, when the barbarians of that day were making havoc of the things of God: Peccatis nostris barbari fortes sunt[68]—“In our sins the barbarians are strong.” But let them not venture to say that Almighty God, because he allows them a fatal facility of blasphemous impiety, protects and even caresses this impiety. For religious men will answer them: Yes, he protects and caresses you, as he protected and caressed the crucifiers of his only-begotten Son.

And here we entreat the Israelitish editor of the Opinione to pay strict attention to what we have to say, inasmuch as it concerns him in his nationality; since he is an Israelite by nature and nation, and Italian only by the place of his accidental birth.

The synagogue, sustained by the coalition of Pharisees and Sadducees, undertook to regenerate Judea by taking the life of Jesus, Son of God, true God and true Man. The great sin of Jesus Christ in the eyes of the synagogue was similar to that of the church of Jesus in the eyes of the Masonic Order. He was the Son of God and the Word of Truth, as the church is his spouse and the organ of the truth.

But there stood many obstacles in the way of compassing his death. First, there needed a lawful sanction, and there was none. Secondly, it was necessary to take him captive, a very dangerous undertaking, for he was always surrounded by throngs of devoted followers and friends. Thirdly, it was necessary to keep the people in good humor, or, as Jesus was their principal benefactor, they might rebel against this public execution. Fourthly, it was necessary to ascertain that the Romans, who had cognizance of capital cases in Palestine, would connive at his trial for life and at his sentence to death. Fifthly, they had to risk the display of his miraculous power, for his miracles surpassed all that had ever been seen in Israel. It must be admitted that these difficulties were very formidable. Yet what happened? Everything was made easy. The sanction of law was found in a tissue of lies and political misindictments, successful beyond all expectation. His capture proved the easiest imaginable, through the unexpected treachery of one of his own disciples, who sold him for a bauble. The populace was led with wonderful facility not only not to rise to his rescue, but in a solemn plébiscite to save the robber Barabbas at his expense, and to sentence him to an ignominious death. The Romans made some show, through Pilate, in his defence; but after five times declaring him innocent of every charge, condemned him to the cross, following the will of the synagogue to the last; and finally Jesus, though challenged with insult to the exercise of his supernatural powers, abstained mysteriously from their use, and did nothing to withdraw himself from torture or death. Could any greater facility of consummation be imagined than was here shown in the accomplishment of this tremendous deicidal act? But will our Israelitish apostle have the heart to undertake to win over Italian Catholics to the belief that the wonderful success of the crucifixion (permitted, as it undeniably was) is to be construed as a caress bestowed by Providence upon a corrupt and apostate synagogue, and as a palpable and unmistakable proof of his protection of the bloody and treacherous council that sentenced him to death?

Between the Jewish sacrilege directed against the adorable Person of the Incarnate Word, and the Italian sacrilege against the Vicar of that Word, there is but this distinction: that the Person aimed at in the former was God present in his human nature, and the Person aimed at in the latter was God present in his church.

In the days of Pontius Pilate and Caiphas, the Jews slew the material body of our Blessed Lord: the latter-day Jews, in these days of Lanza and Visconti-Venosta, would, if they could, slay the Spiritual Body of the same Jesus Christ. And do you dare, wretched Pharisees, to ask of us Catholic believers to recognize in the facilities that have attended until now this monstrous sacrilege of yours, this second deicidal act, the smiles of an approving Providence, and the marks of a divine protection accorded to the prompt success of your heaven-defying crime?

The capital error of the gross and impious sophism now the subject of our comment, consists evidently in the assumption that easy and unexpected success (in operations ordinarily of a very arduous character) is a sure note of the divine approval, even when the accomplished facts are manifest breaches of the Decalogue.

A proposition of this sort, if it had the least value, would serve to sanction any atrocity, however monstrous, provided it were only successfully and rapidly achieved.

Such wretches as Passatori, Ninco Nanchi, Carusi, and Troppmann ought in this view to be regarded as protected and caressed by Divine Providence. Every prosperous villain would only have to quote to his judges the argument of the Opinione to conciliate their approbation, and to obtain from them not only an acquittal, but an honorable testimonial in high praise of these favorites of heaven.

True it is, however, that a striking and brilliant success dazzles the judgment of men without faith, or of men with faith as sensual as their flesh.

We Catholics, on the contrary, are rich in the possession of a divine promise which keeps us cheerful and buoyant with hope in the face of what seems like the final triumph of the wicked. And this is more especially true when we have to deal with those who plot against the church and its visible Head, adversus Dominum, et adversus Christum ejus. Nobody that we know of has set this promise in a truer light than P. Paul Segneri, and we take the liberty to transcribe here for our readers two or three passages of his, which are just so much gold to the purpose we have in view.

“‘The prosperity of fools,’ says Solomon, ‘shall destroy them.’ He does not say ‘destroys them,’ but ‘shall destroy them.’ Why so? Because the prosperity of the wicked does not always produce immediately its disastrous effects. Sometimes the reverse comes after long delay. Wait patiently. You will see the end of what seems to begin so well. Have you never read in the Book of Job how that the Almighty takes pleasure in defeating the machinations of the impious? He brings their counsellors to a foolish end.” Not to a bad beginning. No; all seems prosperous at first. It is the end that is disastrous. He lets them raise aloft their mighty tower of Babel. But afterwards, in the confusion of their pride, they disperse and are gone. He lets them build up the beautiful towers of Siloe; but these fall, and the builders are buried beneath the ruins. For want of this reflection, many men wonder at the prosperity of the wicked. Even the prophets themselves address God sometimes with tender reproaches. They almost accuse him, I might say. We are apt to look too much at the beginning of things, and not, like holy David, at the end. Donec intelligam in novissimis eorum. As much as to say, they are so taken up with gazing upon the comely golden head of their tall Babylonian colossus, that they have not thought of lowering their eyes to see its brittle legs of clay. Now hear me, and witness the establishment of the truth. If ever since the birth of Christ there was a race of men who rose by unscrupulous arts to enormous wealth and power, it was doubtless the Greek emperors, tyrants as they may well be called. Now answer me, Have there ever existed empires which have furnished subjects for tragedy more truly horrible than theirs?

“Nicephorus succeeded at first by the employment of dishonest means to usurp the imperial power, driving away the right inheritress, Irene. What then? Crushed by a series of misfortunes, he began to look upon himself as a modern Pharaoh, hardened by defeats. Finally, vanquished and slain by the Bulgarians, his enemies made a drinking-cup of his skull, and out of joy or derision used it as such in the diversions of the camp. Stauratius by illegitimate alliances, and Leo the Armenian by repeated high-handed rebellions, succeeded in establishing themselves in the height of power. How long was it before these two men died under the blows of the assassin, the former in war, and the latter at the altar he had profaned? Michael the Stammerer was so fortunate as to step, in his famous conspiracy, from the dungeon to the throne; demanding there the worship of his subjects, the chain still on his neck and the fetters on his feet. Intoxicated by his success, he compelled a holy virgin to share his bed. All Sclavonia revolted, his entire army deserted him; nor yet repenting, he was literally devoured by a malady the most disgusting. Theophilus was successful in suppressing, for reasons of state, the veneration of sacred images; but almost immediately after, on being shamefully defeated by the Saracens, died of rage and intense mortification. Michael III., regarded as another Nero on account of his licentiousness and cruelty, succeeded so far as to put his mother and guardians out of the way, in order to reign without opposition or control. He ended his ‘prosperous’ career by kindling against himself the hatred of his subjects, and encountered rebellion after rebellion, in the last of which, in the midst of a drunken debauch, he paid the forfeit of his life. Alexander attained a sort of success in plundering the holy altars, and in appropriating the gold thus obtained to his own private use; but very soon thereafter he was seized with a sudden madness, and he had not held out a year when he ended his life in a fearful vomiting of blood. What shall I say of Romanus I.? He too was successful to all appearance; for, by a stratagem of wonderful adroitness, he expelled the legitimate possessor from the patriarchal see of Constantinople, and placed in it a mere child, his own son. The year following he himself was driven from the imperial throne by another son, and banished to a lonely isle for life. So also fared it with Romanus II. Impelled by the lust of dominion, he took the life of his own father by poison. His own life was taken very shortly after, and by the self-same means. Michael Paphlagonius, by infamous devices, carried his point of usurping the throne. Seized suddenly with demoniacal obsession, he could obtain no repose. Exorcisms and almsgivings were tried in vain. He died as he lived, with his agony unrelieved. Michael Calaphates was ‘successful’ in driving the empress into exile, that he might reign alone; but the people rose against him at once, stoned him, deprived him of sight, and dragged him through the city streets more dead than alive. Diogenes and Andronicus, two usurpers who had ‘succeeded’ in their treason, one by a courtesan’s vile aid, the other by the arm of an assassin, came to the same lamentable end.

“Now answer me! Can you look upon as truly successful the wicked arts which brought these bad men to power? Speak out! Would you be willing to enjoy their ‘prosperity’ if with it you had to accept its reverse? Is there any one so stupid as to envy their short-lived ‘good luck’? Rest assured that such has ever been the fate of those who attain for a time their unhallowed ends by iniquitous means. ‘The prosperity of fools will destroy them.’ Doubt it not, my friends. The prosperity of fools will most assuredly destroy them. It is hardly worth while to labor longer in the proof. All writings, all ages, all powers, attest in unison this truth, that ‘Justice exalteth a nation’; and this other, that ‘Injustice leadeth a nation to misery and ruin.’ These are the words of one who was the wisest among men; and elsewhere he says, ‘Man shall not be strengthened by wickedness’; and, again, ‘The unjust shall be caught in their own snares’; and then, again, ‘They who sow iniquity shall reap destruction.’”

Thus, by examples drawn from the annals of the Byzantines (a race dear to our modern liberals), the eloquent Segneri points out the end which, according to Holy Writ, awaits the criminal successes of the wicked. If he had chosen to embrace a wider range of history, he might have compiled an endless catalogue of examples the most frightful; commencing with the dreadful success of the crucifixion of our ever blessed Lord, of which the sequel was as dreadful a retribution. The synagogue nailed the Messiah to the cross, under the pretext that otherwise the Romans would come and occupy Jerusalem. And precisely because they did this wicked thing, the Romans took Jerusalem and levelled it to the ground. So that the very success of the Jews, which, execrable as it was, the Opinione would have adored as a protecting caress bestowed by Providence upon Sion, ended simply in bringing upon the guilty city a horrible siege and irremediable ruin.

We content ourselves, for our part, in citing the Roman Cæsars, who, in the first three centuries, renewed ten different times, and with all the incidents of success, the bloody persecution of the followers of Christ. All of these, without a single exception, came to a wretched end. When the fourth century arrived to witness the triumph of Christianity, the descendants of the persecuting emperors were found extinct by foul or violent deaths; the series closing with Maximin breathing his last amid the agonies of poison and the blasphemous howlings of despair, and with Candidianus (the adulterous son of Galerius, adopted by Valeria, Maximin’s wife) murdered by Licinius along with another brother, a sister in tender age, and finally Valeria herself. It thus appears that the massacre of the Christians, which our modern Caiphases would have celebrated as an edifying “divine caress,” had this one effect after all, viz., to bring around the lasting triumph of the persecuted cause. It was the children of the slaughtered ones who were victorious in the end; the progeny of the slaughterers died suffocated in the blood which their guilty fathers had shed.

We might easily continue these examples, and recount, for instance, the end to which a career of successful iniquity at last conducted Julian the Apostate, the idol and exemplar of our Italian regenerators. We might enlarge on the fates of Astolphus and Desiderius, whose “patriotism” they so much admire. We might with still more force bring out contemporary cases, the case of Cavour, for example, withdrawn suddenly away by an ominous death in the flower of life from the hosannas of the people he had misled; the case of Farini, Cavour’s right-hand man, struck also in life’s prime by a shocking frenzy which urged him to acts incredibly revolting, and soon after to a most painful death; the case of Fanti, the plunderer of Umbria, who, before he could die, was tortured for a year with all the agonies of death; the case of Persano, the bombarder of Ancona, who, after making shipwreck on the sea of Lissa of his rank and reputation, avenged himself of fortune by publishing the infamies of the successful revolution. And to these we might add the cases of Pinelli, of Valerio, of La Farina, and of a hundred others equally conclusive. We might even quote examples among the living; of a certain regenerator, who, in spite of his impious successes, roams incessantly from place to place seeking a rest he cannot find—condemned, it would seem, to endure the torments of Caina, Antenora, and Ptolomea in Dante’s ninth circle of hell, and to realize in himself the fate described by Alberigo:

To be brief, we shall confine ourselves to the two most distinguished and most successful persecutors of popes—Frederick II., a mediæval emperor of Germany, and Napoleon the First, a French emperor of the modern sort. Both of these men, in the studied outrages they inflicted, the one upon Gregory IX. and Innocent IV., the other on Pius VII., were encouraged by such marvellous successes that our Israelitish proselytizer would have had them canonized as the very Benjamins of Providence. Suffice it to say that Frederick II. had his political Cæsarism preached into right divine by the most learned jurists of his day, just as Napoleon I. made the most powerful monarchy of Europe kneel down and adore his bloodier Cæsarism of the sword. Both the one and the other returning from their triumphs, carried fortune, to all appearance, chained for ever to their cars. The more they raged against Christ’s Vicar, the more their victory seemed complete. The greater the number of excommunications they incurred, the easier seemed to be their subsequent encroachments. It was after the last papal censure that Frederick gained the adhesion of several powerful barons in Rome. It was after the Pope’s worst imprisonment that Napoleon won his greatest battles, making them the subjects of the most vainglorious boasts, that he had thus received from the God of armies special marks of approbation—“caresses,” as the Opinione calls them, when bestowed upon the enemies of the church.

Yet where did they end, these lucky sacrileges, this prodigious and prolonged prosperity of crime? Both these men outlived their glittering fortunes. The false magnificence and grandeur for which they had thrown away their souls, turned to ashes in their grasp.

King Henry, Frederick’s eldest son, dies in prison, leaving a son who was struck dead by a blow from an unknown hand. Enzio, his bastard offspring, created by him King of Sardinia, after twenty-five years of imprisonment in a cage of iron dies a miserable death. Ezzelino, his son-in-law closes with a horrible end a life, if possible, of greater horror. His great champion, Thaddeus of Suessa, is slain with every accompaniment of contempt. Pier delle Vigne, his evil genius, has his eyes thrust out, and commits suicide in his despair. Frederick himself, after surviving all these horrors, is strangled by Manfredi, another of his base-born sons, who, after bathing his gory hands in the blood of Conrad, Frederick’s lawful son, is himself stretched dead on the field of a dishonorable strife. To close this interminable tragedy, Corradino, the last scion of the hated tyrant, ends on a felon’s scaffold his seventeen short years of life. With this unfortunate youth the dynasty of Frederick is closed. The empire passes over into other hands, and Rodolph of Hapsburg reigns, the first of a better line.

The fall of Napoleon I. is still remembered as an event of recent date. Elated with his continual victories, he invaded Russia with the most formidable army the world ever saw. Warned that he had the fate of the excommunicated to encounter, he asked in scorn whether his soldiers would drop their muskets at the sight of a Papal Bull. Forced to retreat after a show of vain success, famine and frost decimated his ranks, and his soldiers’ frozen fingers refused to hold the interdicted arms. Unable to contend against fast-increasing numbers, he found himself by a strange fatality compelled to renounce the crown in the very palace at Fontainebleau which he had turned into a prison for the Pope. The Holy Father had quitted it to resume the throne. The fallen emperor left it to accept in Elba an asylum which he begged as a shelter in his friendless old age. Leaving his place of refuge, in a mad attempt to resuscitate his fortunes, he incurred at Waterloo a ruin the most disastrous ever known. Stripped of every resource, he was dragged to a prison-cell on a miserable island, scarcely noticeable in its vast expanse of sea. From this inhospitable rock, he was permitted to contemplate the plenary restoration of the mysterious Papal power, and simultaneously the downfall of all the thrones he had presented to his brothers and next of kin. After spending, in desolate captivity, the five years he had decreed of prison to the blameless Pius VII., he gave up his tortured soul to meet the just displeasure of his God. What more striking confirmation can we ask of the truth of those awful words, “They who sow injustice” sooner or later “shall reap its bitter fruits”?

It would not do to pass without notice the still living and speaking case of Napoleon III. Who but he has been the foremost leader of the regenerators of unhappy Italy? The Gog and Magog of our Italian pharisees! And are not these the men who fell down and worshipped the divine prosperity of their master’s eighteen years of empire? Have they not claimed it as a miracle of God’s favor, a long and lasting “caress” of Providence, the possible failure of which it would be impious to suspect? Have they not sung and celebrated, time and again, the famous victory of Solferino as a prodigy sent from heaven to show that the Almighty took the side of Italy, and had declared against the Pope?

Well, now, what has become of this epopee of miraculous prosperity, this note of ruin to Catholic Christianity, to the claims of the Holy See, and (as justly we might say) to the repose and peace of Europe? It came to naught in Sedan, in a military defeat and a dynastic misfortune the most appalling that ever was known or written of in the world.

And it so came to naught precisely because of the “success” at Solferino. That victory of Napoleon’s, chanted so loudly and so often by the pious Jew editor of the Opinione as an unmistakable revelation of God’s decision in favor of Bonaparte and his new Italy—that victory (when the hour of Sedan had come) was plainly seen as the manifest cause of his every subsequent reverse. Who can help perceiving now that, had not Austria lost the battle of Solferino, won by France that Italy might be “made,” Austria would not have lost the battle at Sadowa, achieved by Prussia that Germany might be “made”? And had not Austria lost at Sadowa, is it not plain that Napoleon would never have been dragged down into the horrible catastrophe of Sedan? In this catastrophe we find the meaning of the “approving smile” at Solferino. The “caress,” we are told, was intended for the third Napoleon. For whom, then, was intended the crushing dispensation at Sedan?

Will our kind converters to the new reading of the ways of Providence reflect maturely on this matter? All genuine Christian gentlemen, all admitted men of honor (except a few who were misled), regarded the war of 1859, so well characterized by the victory of Solferino, as iniquitous in its motives and as anti-Christian in its scope. It was looked upon by all as a magnum latrocinium, a godless scheme of robbery; but it had what its perpetrators called “a great success.” Eleven years roll by, and what do we see?

Napoleon III., at first so splendidly victorious by the force of an act of larceny that dispossessed four princes and displaced the Pope, is caught at last like a weasel in a trap, dethroned in his turn, driven off in scorn, steeped to the lips in indelible disgrace; all his marshals and generals, without a solitary exception, ignominiously humbled, soundly beaten, and detained in durance vile by a logical rebound from their first Italian success; all his army, four hundred thousand strong, lately invincible, now led into exile or captivity, to shiver with cold or to wince under the epithets of scorn. Victorious France, in retribution for her “new idea” of nationality, and to set the good example, yields up the costly tribute of two of her wealthiest provinces; just the number she had stolen from Italy, on the strength of the “new idea,” as her due for allowing Piedmont to absorb the entire peninsula within her ravenous maw.

How is it possible not to recognize, in this unprecedented drama, the real lesson of divine retaliation, the exclusive right of Providence to repay—to exact eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and life for life, when such extremity is required? Who will hesitate to say with the poet:

And in this most memorable reverse of Napoleon III., we invite our apostolic interpreters of Providence to note a special fact. The fallen emperor not only lives to realize the forfeiture of all his fame, differing herein from those who die before the loss, but has to endure the bitterness of witnessing the demolition of all the proud creations of his reign. He had raised France to the pinnacle of earthly greatness, had just crowned, as he himself phrased it, the glorious edifice his genius had successfully constructed. France is now dismembered, dilapidated, a mass of melancholy ruin; reduced to chaos militarily, morally, politically, and to a great extent materially, if this last trait be deemed of much account.

He had decorated the palaces of St. Cloud and the Tuileries with munificence more than Asiatic. They are stripped to the bare walls. He rose, on the wings of the plébiscite, from obscurity to a throne. The plébiscite is now an obsolete absurdity. The treaty of Paris, which crowned the triumphs of the East; the Chinese victories and ovations at Canton and Palikao; the Mexican Empire, the fruit of so much toil and treasure, the price of the good name and fame of France; the Prague conventions, intended to defeat the growth of Prussia into a vast and consolidated Germany—of all these magnificent enterprises not a trace. In short, the countless dazzling exploits of the prosperous reign of the third Napoleon have vanished for ever like so many dissolving views. One work, one only work survives—the Subalpine government of Italy, to lick which hideous monster into shape the unhappy monarch threw recklessly away his honor and his crown. We might pursue this train of thought to its logical conclusion, but we refrain. Too strict an application of the laws of logic might bring us into conflict with other laws which we prefer not to provoke. But we may perhaps venture to request our pious friends of the “Regeneration” to undertake the argument themselves—an argument which runs on almost of itself, being one of the kind which dialecticians call reasoning from analogy. Let them look to it well, and say if there be not better ground to be anxious about the life of their Italy than there is to be solicitous about converting Catholics to the modern dogma, that the voice of an accomplished fact is no less than the voice of God; that the lucky consummation of a crime is itself the signal of the divine applause. Let them reflect that not a fact, which ceases afterwards to be a fact, can come into being or go out of it, without, at least, the permissive sanction of Almighty God. Let them pause and consider that the series of events, opened by Providence in 1859, is not absolutely or finally closed. Let them ever bear in mind that, when least it is expected, Providence may complete the line of this analogy by dissolving into nothingness the only remnant left of all the Napoleonic creations. The world and the ages will then believe that not a single one of the supposed marks of the divine “caress,” claimed by Italy’s regenerators, was really a mark of favor; but simply one of the many illustrations of the way in which the scorner is caught in the midst of his devices: In insidiis suis capientur iniqui.

In what we have advanced, we have, as seems to us, fairly and fully refuted the boastful syllogism of our adversaries. We shall conclude by exhorting them to lay aside all hope of converting Catholics by a show of blasphemous successes or an appeal to the longest impunity of crime. Go on, gentlemen! Enjoy your fortune! Vaunt as loudly as you will the triumphs you have secured over us, over the church, over the rights of the Holy See. Do all this, and welcome. But when you come to tell us that Providence is “caressing your cause,” and ask our adhesion to this impiety, we warn you to desist. Satan himself would not dare to give utterance to such an insult, or even to harbor such a thought. Providence has allowed you, in the abuse of your own free-will, a certain measure of easy success; as he allowed it to the synagogue, to the Cæsars, to Julian the Apostate, to Desiderius, and to all such of your predecessors as were permitted for a time to triumph over Christ and his commandments. And this he has allowed to you, not as to his loved ones, but as to his persecutors, that you may be the rod of his justice against the sins of the world. He will make this to yourselves, if you repent not, a snare and a delusion; to the church, an assurance of greater exaltation; and to all of us, a call to better service and obedience. We as Catholics know that we must bow beneath your blows. We bear the pain of them in peace, because faith teaches us that even scourges are wielded by God, and that his hand is to be kissed as much when it strikes as when it strengthens. For this reason we can accept you as you are. And yet we see in you no higher mark than that of our flagellators and the exercisers of our patience; but be warned in time. God makes use of his scourges, and then destroys them. We have made this plain to you by innumerable examples. Beware! for the prosperous days of God’s scourges end invariably in misfortune and disaster. Beware, for the good times of the enemies of Jesus Christ and his church have ever been as pitfalls with a covering of roses; yokes of iron masked by a drapery of flowers. On the contrary, from her greatest tribulations the church has ever issued brighter, lovelier, and more radiant than before. She numbers as many victories as battles, as many prisoners as foes. All the promises of God are for her and against you, and all history attests that of these promises not a syllable has failed. The church is our mother; her cause is our own. We have, therefore, no fear for the result. You may scorn us, you may strip us, you may deny us the protection of the laws. You may tear us limb from limb during the brief occasion of your power. But conquer us, no! In all eternity, you cannot. God has ordered it that we shall be your victors. Rallying close to the Vicar of the King of heaven, and faithful to the call of his immortal Spouse, we shall announce to you, with front uplifted, that we have conquered you; or (if that better pleases you) that Christ has conquered you through us. Laugh to your hearts’ content at this faith of ours. All your predecessors have done as much. Yet who triumphed in the end? So certain are we of the victory that we scarce dare hasten it by our desires. The thought of the bolts of divine wrath impending over you appalls us, and we abstain, out of pity for you, from asking what Dante, on a like occasion, prayed for in these words: