I. Roma Eterna

tcrprise for such a body to undertake to write the Acta Romanorum Pontificum and the History, of the Catholic Episcopate, in which the unity and the universality of Rome are expressed.

And now what shall I, horn inter divisos toto orbe Britannos, venture to propose to you on this auspicious solemnity? Though Aristotle, in his Rhetorica, tells us that it is an easy task to praise Athens among the Athenians, I find it no easy task to celebrate Rome in the hearing of Romans. Of what shall I speak? Among the constellations of its glories, ancient, medi aeval, and modern, both in the natural and the supernatural order, which shall I choose as my theme? and how shall I speak of it? How will the delicate Roman ear of such an auditory as I see before me endure the strangeness of our accents and of our thoughts in speaking of that which is so dear and so intimate to your hearts? Nevertheless, I must adventure as I may, confiding only in the largeness of your clemency.

I dare say we can all remember how, in our boyhood, the title ' the Eternal City ' inspired us with awe and wonder; but how in after years, when the first antipa thies of criticism began to work in us, we resented the use of such an epithet as a pagan apotheosis of the Dea Roma. And yet, as time goes on, and reflection be comes mature, we can perceive under it a truth so sin gular in its kind and so vast in its proportions as to render this great title, not a literal definition indeed, but a symbol of the greatest history the world has ever seen. It would be to say little if I were to compare the duration of Rome with the duration of any other city.

It would not bo to say too much if I were to affirm that the only city which has not only overpassed the duration of all others, but has alone borne any proportion to the destinies of the whole human race, is the city of Rome.

In order to express this truth, I shall not need to clear away the sands which hide from the eyes of men the very sites of Nineve and of Babylon, nor to point to the cities of Central America, the outlines of which are marked to this day as the extinct craters which denote the volcanic activity of the past along the line of your Apennines. I shall not attempt to play the antiquary, nor to inquire into the date of Vaticanum or Saturnia, of Tarquinium or Romuria, or of the nine Romes which, as we are told, crowned the seven hills before Rome was. It will not help my theme to affirm, ' Roma ante Romulum fuit. Et ab ea nomen Romulus adquisivit."-' I am not now speaking of a mere duration of time, — of an antiquity numbered by years, — but of a duration of power and dominion, of beneficence and sovereignty, which, in the history of mankind, Rome has possessed and wielded beyond all other cities of the world. Let me, then, say a few words on this great title, — the Eternity of Rome.

I know of only one other city which can compare with it. Jerusalem of the Old Law,— the city of the Prophets, the cradle of the Messias who was yet to come, — for a thousand years grew and expanded, diffusing its light and its influence by the dispersion of

• Rome existed before Romulus; from her Romulus derived his its children, first among the nations of the East, and next among the nations of this world. But now for another thousand years it has heen dethroned and in bondage. The glories of the city of David have passed to the Jerusalem of the New Law, the city of the Apostles and of the Messias already come, who by His Vicar reigns in it, and by it governs the supernatural order of the world. How much more emphatically fulfilled in our mouths are the words of the Prophet, ' Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo. Facta est quasi vidua domina gentium. Princeps provinciarum facta est sub tribute.'3 It is as if Jerusalem had said, in the words of the Baptist, to the city which should take up the crown fallen from its head, ' She must increase, but I must decrease.' And to these two, the queens of the human race, the words of S. Paul may in very truth be applied: ' Jerusalem, which is in bondage with her children; but the Jerusalem which is above is free, which is our Mother ' (Gal. iv. 25, 26).

I am well aware that in using this language I am speaking in a tongue which the men of the nineteenth century deride; but I know that it is the language of faith and of Rome. With the august example of our Holy Father shining as a light above us and around us, who will not be thankful and joyful to be allowed to share in the opposition which is his inheritance and his chalice?

I would affirm, then, that Rome would have been

3 ' How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people. How is the mistress of the nations become as a widow. The princess of pro vinces is made tributary' (Lam. i. 1).

S ROMA STERNA.

as transient as other cities built by man, if a higher life and a supernatural perpetuity had not descended upon it; that there is nothing great in Rome which is not derived from the Incarnation, nor anything little in Rome except that which is opposed to this supernatural greatness.

It took of old five hundred years to subdue the south of Italy to the sway of regal and republican Rome. And before another five hundred years had passed, Rome had subdued the world, mapped out its surface, traversed it by roads, organised it by legislation, taught it to speak its one language, and to obey its one will. And yet already the seeds of dissolution were sown in it, and it was doomed to die. As S. Augustin says, Si recedit Spiritus Dei, Spiritus hominis revolvitur in carnem.'4 This mightiest structure of the human intelligence, and of the human will, which summed up in itself the accumulated traditions of civilisation and philosophy, of science and government, was no sooner ripe than it began to rot. It had its root in the powers of nature, and its stature, though lofty and majestic, did not rise above the natural order. If the Divine will had not interposed, Rome would have waned and passed away as Tyre and Sidon. The foxes would have barked upon the Aveutiiie as when Belisarius rode through its desolation, and shepherds would have folded their flocks upon the Seven Hills as they do at this day upon the gardens of its mighty suburbs. Its natural life was well-nigh spent, and its hour to return

« • If the Spirit of God departs, the Bpirit of man returns to into the dust was near at hand, when a Divine interposition came.

Rome was destined to receive a supernatural graft, and by this to live again, with a new and inextinguishable life. And yet before this it was doomed to die. The words of our Divine Master were to be fulfilled in it: ' Nisi granum frumenti cadens in terram mortuum fuerit, ipsum solum manet.'5 It was a perplexing and an irritating spectacle for the Roman people to behold the city which had ruled the world desolate, forsaken by its imperial master, spoiled for the adornment of a trading town upon the shores of the Bosphorus. Every day its splendour grew more dim, and the action of its will upon the provinces and the nations grew more feeble. No wonder the Pagans accused Christianity of the downfall of Rome. No wonder S. Augustin had to labour, to write a work in two-and-tvventy books to show that Rome was perishing through its inbred cor ruptions in religion, in philosophy, in politics, and in morals, and could be saved only by accepting its vocation to be the Jerusalem of the New Law.

Rome had already governed the nations of the world by the power of natural prudence, and by the command of the natural will. It had subdued and controlled the strong by a strength greater than their own. It had endured for a longer time in the splendour of its sway than any other empire. Yet all this was mortal and transient. To live on, it must needs be elevated to another order in the works of God, in which alone per-

5 ' Unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground die, itself remaineth alone' (S. John xii. 2-1).

petuity can be found. And that is no other than the new creation, the order of the Incarnation. But like as Jerusalem little knew the presence of its Redeemer while He taught in its streets, and at evening withdrew from its inhospitable thresholds to pass the night in prayer upon the Mount of Olives, so Rome for centuries was unconscious of the supernatural Presence which was to redeem it from the law of death. S. Leo has has said: ' Hrec autem civitas, ignorans SUJB provectionis auctorem, cum tune omnibus dominaretur gentibus, omnium gentium serviebat erroribus.'6 It had become the seat of the Word made Flesh, the centre of His kingdom, the throne of His power. While the frontiers of its former sway were giving way to the invasion of new and irresistible hordes, and its pro vinces were fulling from their fidelity, and the conquered nations were rising against their Queen, and all the bonds which the wisdom and power of a thousand years had created were dissolving, new virtues were going out from it, powers not new alone, but of an order transcending all its former consciousness. Rome had been lifted to the supernatural order. It had become the source and the centre of influences, creative and divine. It was no longer a mere material architect of human civilisation, but a teacher and a guide, a legislator and an arbiter in the spiritual world. S. Leo defines this change with the majestic precision of his eloquence: ' Isti sunt viri per quos Evangelium Christi Roma; resplenduit, et qua) erat Magistra erroris, facta

• • Thia city, ignorant of the author of its increase, when she was reigning over all nations, became enslaved to the errors of all nations.'

ROMA 7ETERNA.

est discipula veritatis.' 'Isti sunt qui te ad hanc gloriam provexerint, ut gens sancta, populus electus, civitas sacerdotalis et regia, per sacram B. Petri sedem caput orbis effecta, latins pracsideres religione divina, quam dominatione terrena.'7

It was but a small thing to impose its laws, and even its language, upon the nations subject to its sway. This was an exterior work which mere power might accomplish. A greater work was yet to be done. The nations of the world were to be inwardly changed and assimilated to the mind and will of Eome. It was to become the type and the standard of the intellectual, moral, spiritual, and social perfection to mankind.

And this could be effected by a spiritual power alone. It would be greatly out of time and place if I were to detain you by descanting upon the spiritual mission of Rome in converting the nations of the world. What all the power of Imperial Rome could not do Christian Rome accomplished. It illuminated its pro vinces with the knowledge of the true God, and cleansed them by the purities of His kingdom of grace. The apostolic mission grew and bound the races and people of all lands to the Apostolic See, and thereby to Rome. A new centripetal law redressed the centrifugal forces which were rapidly dissolving its imperial unity. What Rome of the kings, of the consuls, of the emperors,

7 ' These are the men through whom the Gospel of Christ shone at Home, and she who was the teacher of error became a learner of the truth.' ' These are those who raised thee to this glory, so that thou, a holy nation, a chosen people, a priestly and royal city, wast made, by the holy see of Blessed Peter, the capital of the world, obtaining wider sway by the power of religion than by earthly sovereignty.' could not do, Rome of the Pontiffs accomplished. They could not win the will of those they subdued, or make them rejoice in their subjection. The name of Rome was detested by the very races who loved the Pontiffs as their Fathers in Christ. The love of Christian Rome prevailed over the traditional hatreds of mankind.

Such was the action of the faith illuminating the intelligence of the nations with the equable and stead fast light of the knowledge of God, and binding them in one family by the Sacraments of grace. Under the higher action of this spiritual influence, an intellectual culture and an intellectual unity has been propa gated among the races of the Christian family. As all the scattered lights of what may be called the theology of nature were gathered and purified in the illumination of the one true faith so that all religions passed away before the religion of Jesus Christ, in like manner all philosophies were harmonised and absorbed into the one intellectual science of the Church, by which the revelation of supernatural truth was justified, illustrated, and defended. The human reason, which had fallen into innumerable and interminable errors by playing the critic, was elevated, strengthened, and enlarged by becoming the disciple of a Divine Teacher. The intellect of Christendom has ascended to a sphere of light and of philosophy unattainable without a revelation and a perpetual Divine authority. It is Rome which has presided over this intellectual development, and has sat as an arbiter of its discussions, and has given unity and perpetuity to its scientific traditions.

An inevitable consequence of the intellectual superiority in the order of moral truth is what we call civilisation. I know of no point of view in which the glory of Rome is more conspicuous than in its civil mission to the races of the world. When the seat of empire was translated from Rome to Constantinople, all the culture and civilisation of Italy seemed to be carried away to enrich and to adorn the East. It seemed as if God had decreed to reveal to the world what His Church could do without the world, and what the world could not do without the Church. A more melancholy history than that of the Byzantine Empire is nowhere to he read. It is one long narrative of the usurpation and insolent dominion of the world over the Church, which, hecoming schismatical and isolated, fell easily under its imperial masters. With all its barbaric splendour and its imperial power, what has Constan tinople accomplished for the civilisation or the Christianity of the East? If the salt had kept its savour, it would not have been cast out and trodden under the feet of the Eastern Antichrist.

WThile this was accomplishing in the East, in the West a new world was rising, in order, unity, and fruitfulness, under the action of the Pontiffs. Even the hordes which inundated Italy were changed by them from the wildness of Nature to the life of Christian civilisation. From S. Leo to S. Gregory the Great, Christian Europe may be said not to exist. Rome stood alone under the rule of its Pontiffs, while as yet empires and kingdoms had no existence. Thus little by little, and one by one, the nations which now make up the unity of Christendom were created, trained, and formed to political societies. First Lombardy, then Gaul, then Spain, then Germany, then Saxon England; then the first germs of lesser states began to appear. But to whom did they owe the laws, the principles, and the influences which made their existence possible coherent, and mature? It was to the Roman Pontiffs that they owed the first rudiments of their social and political order. It was the exposition of the Divine law by the lips of the Vicar of Jesus Christ that founded the Christian polity of the world.

This the Church has been able to do without the world, and even in spite of it. Nothing can be conceived more isolated, more feeble, or more encompassed with peril, than the line of the Roman Pontiffs; nevertheless they have maintained inviolate their independence, with their sacred deposit of faith and of jurisdiction, through all ages and through all conflicts, from the beginning to this hour. It seemed as if God willed to remove the first Christian emperor from Rome in the early fervour of his conversion, lest it should seem as if the sovereignty of the Church were in any way the creation of his power. God is jealous of His own kingdom, and will not suffer any unconsecrated hand to be laid upon His ark, even for its support.

The ' stone cut out without hands,' which became a great mountain and filled the whole earth, is typical not only of the expansion and universality of the Church, but of its mysterious and supernatural character. No human hand has accomplished its greatness. The hand of God alone could bring it to pass. What is there in the history of the world parallel to the Rome of the

Christians? " The most warlike and imperial people of the world gave place to a people unarmed and without power. The pacific people arose from the Catacombs, and entered upon the possession of Rome as their inheritance. The existence of Christian Rome, both in its first formation, and next in its perpetuity, is a miracle of Di vine power. God alone could give it to His people; God alone could preserve it to them, and them in it. What more wonderful sight than to see a Franciscan monk leading the Via Crucis in the Flavian Amphitheatre, or the Passionist missionaries conversing peacefully among the ilexes and the vaults where the wild beasts from Africa thirsted for the blood of Christians? Who has prevailed upon the world for 1500 years to fall back as Attila did from Christian Rome? Who has persuaded its will, and paralysed its ambitions and conflicting interests? Such were my thoughts the other day when the Sovereign Pontiff, surrounded by the Princes and Pas tors of the Church, was celebrating the Festival of the Resurrection over the Confession of S. Peter. I thought of the ages past, when in the Amphitheatre of Nero, within which we stood, thousands of martyrs fell beneath the arms of the heathen. And now, the Rex Pacificus, the Vicar of the Prince of Peace, there holds his court, and offers over the tomb of the Apostle the unbloody Sacrifice of our redemption. The legions of Rome have given way before a people who have never lifted a hand in war. They have taken the city of the Caesars, and hold it to this day. The more than Imperial Court which surrounded the Vicar of Jesus Christ surpassed the glories of the Empire. * This is the victory which overcoraeth the world, our Faith.' The nohlest spectacle upon earth is au unarmed man, whom all the world cannot bend by favour or by fear. Such a man is essentially above all worldly powers. And such eminent among the inflexible is he, the Pontiff and King who, in the midst of the confusions and rebellions of the whole earth, bestowed that day his benediction upon the city and the world.

It is no wonder to me that Italians should believe in the Primacy of Italy. Italy has indeed a Primacy, but not that of which some have dreamed. The Primacy of Italy is the presence of Rome; and the Primacy of Rome is in its apostleship to the whole human race, in the science of God with which it has illuminated man kind, in its supreme and world-wide jurisdiction over souls, in its high tribunal of appeal from all the autho rities on earth, in its inflexible exposition of the moral law, in its sacred diplomacy, by which it binds the nations of Christendom into a confederacy of order and of justice, — these are its true, supreme, and — because God so has willed — its inalienable and incommunicable primacy among the nations of the earth. Take these away, and Rome becomes less than Jerusalem, and Italy one among the nations, and not among the first. The world does not return upon its path, nor reproduce its past. Time was when Rome wielded an irresistible power by its legions and its armies throughout the world. The nations of Europe and of the East were then barbarous or unorganised, without cohesion, and without unity of will or power. Those uncivilised and dependent provinces are now kingdoms and empires, wielding each a power, in peace and in war, mature and massive as the power of Rome in its ripest season. It is a delirium of the memory for Italy to dream now of empire and of supremacy in the order of nature, that is of war and conquest. The Primacy of Italy is Christian and Catholic, or it has none. Alas for your fair land and for your noble race, if, forgetting its true greatness, it covet false glory which is not its own. In that hour it abdicates its mission — the greatest a people ever had — and descends from its primacy among the nations of the world. A vocation lost is prelude to a fall. This is not to increase, but to decrease before God and man. I do not remember in the history of the world any example of the permanent union of temporal splendour with spiritual fruitfulness and power. The sceptre had departed from Judah when the waters of eternal life flowed from Jerusalem throughout the world. Rome had ceased to be the seat of empire when it became the mother of Christian nations. When Constantinople became imperial, it began to fail in its witness for the Faith and Unity of Jesus Christ. The kingdoms and empires of Christian Europe have been faithful to the Holy See in their depression, and rebellious in their prosperity. The two nations most Catholic, most Christian, most filial in their love of the kingdom of God, are Ireland and Poland. Rome, I may say, because it is the seat of the Vicar of our crucified Lord, is supreme in the spiritual order, feeble in the natural and political. ' It always bears about in the body the mortification of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in its body.' Such is its normal

VOL. I. C state. Let it be recognised as the law of its existence and of its sovereignty, lest the incantations of the tempter steal away the hearts of men with visions of unity and empire and splendour in this world. It is a severe vocation to be the cross-bearers in the procession of the Vicars of our crucified Master. But to this you are called. Romans, if you would renew your courage for this conflict, lift up your eyes to the cloud of wit nesses which hover above your head; to the martyrs and confessors, the Pontiffs and Levites, the virgins and saints, who on this soil, by tears and by blood, have overcome the world, and are now before the throne. Look, too, at the Catholic unity upon earth, which but the other day flew hither on the wings of faith and love and filial devotion to surround the Vicar of Christ; look at the frontiers of the Holy Church, which arc flowing outwards with ever-expanding force, conquering, and embracing the conquered in the unity of the true Fold; look at the circuit of the kingdom of God, which rests upon the sunrise and the sunset, upon the farthest north and upon the islands of the southern seas. It was never yet so vast or wide-spreading; never did the ends of the earth lift up their hands towards the Vicar of the Incarnate Word so universally as at this hour. In the moment of its anguish and its affliction, when the world believes it to be in feebleness and decline, the Holy See is putting forth mightier powers, and reigning over wider realms than ever till now.

But if this be not enough, learn of the world, of its miseries and its anguish. Rome laid the foundations of Christian Europe on the basis of a supernatural unity; and, with all its revolutions and inundations of evil, it abides to tins day. England laid the foundations of North America upon the basis of natural society; and the lifetime of one man is long enough to touch the beginning and the ending of its political unity. The unity of faith, and filial obedience to the unity of the Church in the person of its Head, in ages past fused the discordant races of England, France, and Spain, and made of them kingdoms and monarchies, which endure, in their massive consolidation and unity of mind and will, unto this hour. So God has ever brought social and political unity out of the chaos of disorder. They who begin by contending against the fountain and law of unity doom themselves to division and confusion. They are wrestling with necessity; and he who contends with necessity must fail: ' Whoso shall fall upon that stone shall be broken, and on whomsoever it shall fall it will grind him to powder.'

Bear with me yet a little if I say too much, my Col leagues of the Accademia; I so love, your Eternal City as the head of the nations of the world, that I love it not at all as the capital of a nation. We are surfeited to sickness with national greatness and national pride. London, and Manchester, and Glasgow, and Dublin; Paris, and Lyons, and Madrid; St. Petersburg and New York, — are more than enough, with their gigantic enterprise, worldly splendour, gross material luxury, and low vulgarity of national egotism, to cure any man of the folly of exchanging the Mother and the Mistress of the people of the world for the handmaid and the servant of a nation. If we desire to be citizens of a national capital, we should go elsewhere. Christian Rome is our mother. An Italian London has neither our admiration nor our love.

The eternity of Rome, then, if it be not an exact truth, is nevertheless no mere rhetorical exaggeration. It denotes the fact that Rome has been chosen of God as the centre of His kingdom, which is eternal, as the depository of His eternal truths, as the fountain of His graces which lead men to a higher life, as the witness and guardian of law and principles of which the sanctions and the fruit are eternal. Romans, you have a vocation and a mission, a trust and an account to give at the great day, to which none but you are called. You have inherited the birthright of Jerusalem, not in the supernatural order only, but even in the order of nature. This very city, and you that dwell in it, par take of the destinies and the glories of the Incarnation beyond all other cities and races. You are the sons and the servants, the Levites and the guardians, of the Vicar of the Incarnate Son of God. You are, as your own S. Leo called you of old, ' Gens sancta, populus electus, civitas sacerdotalis et regia.'8 Your very existence is so interwoven with the Incarnation, that its sufferings are your sufferings, its victories your victoties, its glories your glories. Therefore you have lived in eighteen hundred years of combat; therefore you waded through three hundred years of persecution, and have stood as the triarii of your ancient legions, immovable through fifteen hundred years of interminable conflict. When all others gave way before the world,

• ' A holy nation, a chosen people, a city of kings and priests.'

Rome has ever restored the battle. And now once more the cry is heard, ' Res ad triarios perventum est.'9 Bear with me if I venture to utter what we, in our weakness and isolation, hope for at your hands.

I shall say little if I say that on you, under God, we depend for the immutability, not only of the faith in all the radiance of its exposition and illustration, and of the Divine law in all its breadth, and purity, and perfection. You are also charged with the custody of other truths which descend from this great sphere of supernatural light, and with the application of those truths to the turbulent and unstable elements of human society.

You have to bear witness that God has a kingdom among men; that Christianity is not a mere school of speculation, a ' philosophia umbratilis,' an intellectual theory for unoccupied men, feeble, inert, and dependent upon the supremacy of human power; but a true and proper sovereignty over the wills of men and of races, of individuals and of empires; a kingdom not of this world, but in it, and because not of it, therefore superior to it; able to move it because not resting upon it; mighty to control it because it is the kingdom of eternal justice, whose law in the end will infallibly prevail. In all the Christian world save only here, this Divine truth has been enfeebled or betrayed; that is, in all separated countries the world is supreme. Jerusalem, Alex andria, Constantinople, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Canter bury, are witnesses of the judgment which falls on those who falter in their fidelity to the sovereignty of truth. Cj ' The battle has reached to the rear-guard.'

._>•> KOMA STERNA.

In Catholic countries where the national egotism is strong, the action of truth is weak because the sovereignty and independence of the Church are crossed and shackled. With you alone it is in the plenitude of its freedom. Rome is sovereign because it is independent; it is independent because it has no master upon earth. The Vicar of Jesus Christ is the source of its liberty and the guardian of its sovereignty. Call it temporal power if you will, the thing is the same,— the freedom, the independence, the sovereignty of the kingdom of God on earth, in all the world and over all mankind, resting upon its centre in the patrimony of the Church, within which the shadow of no other sovereignty can intrude without a violation of the supernatural order of grace. Because it is the only spot of ground on which the Vicar of Christ can set the sole of his foot in free dom, therefore they who would drive the Incarnation off the face of the earth hover about it to wrest it from his hands. For this, then, you are witnesses and guardians. You are set in an age when the material civilisation of the world has been piled up to a gigantic height, to testify that there is an order higher still; that as the soul is more than the body, and eternity than time, so the moral order is above the material; that justice is above power; that justice may suffer long, but must reign at last; that power is not right; that no wrongs can be sanctified by success; nor can the immutable laws of right and wrong be confounded. You are the heirs of those who renewed the face of the world, and created the Christian civilisation of Europe. Yrou are the depositories of truths and principles which are indestructible in their vitality. Though buried like the ear of corn in the Pyramids of Egypt, they strike root and spring into fruit when their hour is come. Truths and principles are divine; they govern the world; to suffer for them is the greatest glory of man. ' Non mors sed causa mortis facit martyrem.'10 So long as Home is grafted upon the Incarnation, it is the head of the world. If it were possible to cut it out from its Divine root, it would fall from its primacy among mankind. But this cannot be. He who chose it for His own, has kept it to this hour. He who has kept it until now, will keep it unto the end. Be worthy of your high destiny for His sake, who has called you to it; for our sakes, who look up to you as, under God,, our light and our strength.

10 ' Not death, but the cause of death, makes the martyr.'