and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves in God, or for he sake of God, for the heathen retained only faint reminiscences of the primitive revealed religion; and it is true, also, that we find few or no institutions of beneficence, properly so called; but we can hardly persuade ourselves that, as far gone as the Gentiles were, they retained no natural benevolence, no natural kindness, no sympathy with suffering, and performed no acts in relief of the poor and afflicted. Human nature existed then as well as now, and the natural virtues were within their reach, by means of that natural grace, or grace of God as distinguished from the grace of Christ, which is given to all men; and we see not how any society absolutely destitute of natural affection could have held together or subsisted for a day. There must have been then, as in non-Catholic nations now, many who occasionally at least, practised the greater part of the natural virtues; there must have been mutual friendships, mutual attachments, mutual confidence between man and man; and acts of kindness and benevolence towards the poor and afflicted, the sick and infirm, if not sometimes even towards slaves. We find indications of it in all ancient literature; and in Rome the proletarii were so called from being regarded as the proles, or offspring of the city, and were fed by her bounty. Besides, the love which is the distinguishing mark of the disciples of Jesus Christ, is not philanthropy, benevolence, or the simple sentiment of humanity, but charity, a supernatural affection, which loves God supremely for his own sake, and man in him. The Gentile world never lost all trace of the primitive religion, and were never wholly abandoned to disordered nature. Yet there can be no doubt that the Gentile civilization was marked by extreme cruelty and inhumanity, of which it is hard for us to form a conception in our day, and which it is not easy to exaggerate, especially in the laws, institutions, and religions, or superstitions, and we agree with our author in the conviction he expresses, that the Gentiles not seldom reached a depth of cruelty, and of moral degradation, of which even our unregenerate nature

is incapable by itself alone, and which it reaches only under satanic influences.

The popular method just now with Protestants of attacking the Church, is to assert that the nations who adhere to her are less advanced in civilization than those that have emancipated themselves from her authority, and adopted the Reformation. Against this method of attacking the Church, and drawing an inference in favor of Protestantism, the lamented Balmes wrote his popular work, comparing the influence of Catholicity with that of Protestantism on European civilization. The excellent author endeavors to prove that under the influence of Catholicity, civilization had been constantly advancing from the sixth to the sixteenth century; and would, if permitted to continue its course, have long ere this have reached a degree of perfection far beyond what it has now attained to in either Catholic or Protestant nations. He looks upon Luther's movement as an interruption of the progress of civilization, and maintains that Protestantism, so far from advancing, has really retarded, and greatly retarded it. Dr. Manahan says, in substance, suppose Protestant nations are more advanced in civilization than Catholic nations, it is only in material civilization, and in that your Protestant nations do not equal the great Gentile nations of antiquity; and if the Protestant are superior to the Gentile nations in the moral elements of civilization, it proves nothing in their favor, for they owe those elements to the Catholic Church, who

the first to introduce them, and whose active presence in the world, sustains and fecundates them even among nations, originally trained by her, now outside of her communion. Moreover, as our Lord did not found his religion to promote mere material civilization, you can conclude nothing against that religion from the fact, if it be a fact, that your material civilization surpasses that of Catholic nations; and as the distinguishing badge of that religion is love manifesting itself in zeal for the moral wellbeing of man, in beneficent acts or institutions for the relief of the multifarious forms of human suffering, you cannot

conclude any thing to her discredit, unless you can show that in these things you surpass Catholic states,-which you do not, and will not even pretend,-nor indeed even then; for all of these things you have you owe to the influence of the Church, to the habits formed when you were in her communion, or to the light which shines now even to you, as the light that shines from the city set on a hill penetrates and relieves the darkness even beyond its walls.

The Protestant argument certainly proves' too much for those Protestants who really mean to be Christians; for there is no doubt in the mind of any man who has seriously studied the subject, that in the purely material' order, the more renowned nations of antiquity surpassed any modern Protestant nation. Neither Great Britain with all her colonial and other dependencies, and her immense naval and commercial marines, nor the United States with all their industrial activity, and all their vast extent of trade and commerce, can really match, in physical force and material greatness and splendor, ancient Rome, or the vast Asiatic empires that preceded the Roman; and neither has the science of agriculture, or the industrial arts by which it can maintain on the same extent of territory, with so little derived for their subsistence from abroad, so vast a population as that of modern China, or Japan. If we may believe the glowing accounts of Japan, published by some of the English who visited the capital with Lord Elgin, that empire is better policed than Great Britain, and the people more prosperous, better off, more contented, and happy than the people of the United Kingdom, the first Protestant kingdom in the world. The facts in the case, then, if the question is to turn on purely material civilization, prove Christianity false, and authorize us to conclude in favor either of ancient Gentilism or of comparatively modern Buddhism.

It is remarkable how forgetful are our modern Protestants, especially of Great Britain and the United States. What they find true of their respective countries to-day, they imagine has always been true of them. If either has projected a good thing, they treat it as already adopted, and

abuse all other nations who have it not as laggards, as behind the age, as degraded and besotted by popery. Great Britain speaks of the slave trade to-day, as if she had never fought with Spain for the privilege of supplying her colonies with slaves from Africa, and of slavery, as if she had never been a slaveholder, and as if she had not herself forced slavery upon our own country during our colonial dependence on the British crown,-of liberty, as if she had always both enjoyed and upheld it,-of the administration of justice, as if she had never had a Scroggs or a Jeffreys,― of cruel laws and punishments, as if she had not had the worst criminal code in Europe, and had not been remarked among civilized nations for the wretched condition of her prisons, and the severity of her punishments. One would think, to hear Englishmen talk, that England had always respected religious liberty, and had never subjected any man to civil pains and penalties for his religious belief, while even yet her statute-books are disgraced with penal laws against Catholics, which she refuses to repeal. She is fierce for oppressed nationalities,-in Italy and Hungary,— but forgets that she holds subject to her sway more oppressed nationalities than any other European power; that she formed one of the league that prepared the way for the partition and suppression of Poland; that she has, for a century and a half, been leagued with Austria in sustaining the miserable Ottoman empire in holding the oppressed Christian nationalities of the East in subjection. Does she not hold Ireland, Malta, the Ionian Isles, or Septinsular Republic, in subjection, and yet she has the effrontery to complain of Austria for holding Venice by virtue of a treaty to which she was herself a party. All this she forgets. She complains of the temporal government of the Pope, and forgets that she was foremost among the powers that restored to him his temporal Estates on the downfall of the first Napoleon. We, in our way, are just as forgetful. as forgetful. We forget that we are but of yesterday, and that we owe our prosperity to the advantages of our position, and our freedom. from the incumbrances of the Old World. We talk of lib

erty, and yet hold four millions out of thirty in slavery, and though declaring the slave trade piracy, are extensively engaged in it; we boast of education, our free schools, in which we are behind Prussia, France, and Austria; we are great sticklers for universal education, and yet keep some four millions in ignorance, forbid them by law to be taught even to read. We are loud in our censure upon all Catholic States that do not place the sects on an equal footing with the Church, and yet some of our States do not yet place the Church on an equal footing with the sects before the law, and it is only since the formation of the Federal government, that there has been any general recognition of religious liberty in the country. We forget, too, that our experiment of a free government, if it has not failed, has, nevertheless, not yet fully succeeded. It is still a doubtful experiment, and no man can study carefully the political evils of the country, and the manner in which we seek to remedy them, without seeing a strong probability, that here, as elsewhere, extreme democracy, by involving anarchy, must lead at no distant day to military despotism as the only practicable remedy. We can no longer elect a firstclass man to any important office; we can elect only the Polks, the Taylors, the Pierces, and Buchanans for president, and it would seem that at each successive election, we must descend yet lower and lower in the scale. The government is a job, and even the material prosperity of the country does not correspond, and never has corresponded to the extraordinary advantages received from the hand of Providence.

We do not deny that with all its drawbacks, we hold the British and American political system the best in the world; but this system holds in its elements from the old Germanic system, which once prevailed over the greater part of Europe, and in its present form and developments is hardly a hundred years old. We grant that at present the leading industrial and commercial nations of the world are Great Britain and the United States; but how long have they been so? How long will they continue so?