Sermon VII. The Pontificate of Pius IX and the Years of Peter

At the Opening of the Triduum, in the Pro-Cathedral, Kensington, June 16, 1871.

THE PONTIFICATE OF PIUS IX. AND THE YEAKS OF PETER.

Let Thy hand be upon the Man of Thy right hand, and upon the Son of Man Whom Thou hast confirmed for Thyself.

PSALM Ixxix. 18.

Whose hand is this but the hand of the Almighty God? And who is the Man of His right hand but His Incarnate Son, whom He made strong for Himself, that is, to manifest His wisdom and His power in the world? These words which apply, first, to the Son of God at the right hand of His eternal Father, apply likewise to His Vicar, who is His representative on earth. The hand of the Almighty is upon the head of him who, in this world, represents the Son of God; and the strength of the Vicar of Jesus Christ is not the strength of. man, nor of the sons of man, nor of the powers of man, but of God, who has confirmed him for Himself, for His own kingdom, and for the fulfilment of His own will. The words of prophecy, which are spoken to the Incarnate Son of God, belong also to the person m of His Vicar. ' I have set My King upon My holy hill of Sion;' and ' He must reign until He hath put all enemies under His feet.' These words, which apply first and directly to the Son of God, at the right hand of His Father, apply also, by direct consequence, to him whom He has chosen to be the witness of His presence and of His sovereignty among men. And the sovereignty of Jesus Christ reigning over the nations is the fulfilment of prophecies and of parables, and the manifestation of the presence and of the omnipotence of God in the world. The prophecy of Isaias, ' A King shall reign in justice, and princes shall rule in judgment,' has been fulfilled in the Christian world under the sovereignty of Jesus Christ.

In appreciating the signs of the times, we are liable to fall into two contradictory errors. Sometimes we are tempted to believe that the times in which we live are exceptionally great and momentous; that to the magnitude of the events which have happened in these days the past history of the world bears no proportion. This is a common error of exaggeration. On the other side, we are tempted to think that the days in which we live are as nothing in comparison with the days which are past; that they are commonplace and unemphatic, because by use they are familiar to us. We to-day, perhaps, stand in danger of falling into one or the other or both of these errors. We have to-day to appreciate the just value and the true importance of a providential fact, which even the world cannot deny, cynically and unwisely as it attempts to explain away its moral import. The facts of chronology, at least, are beyond the jurisdiction of the men of this world.

To-day we celebrate the fulfilment of the twenty-fifth year of the Pontificate of the Vicar of Jesus Christ; a fact since the martyrdom of Peter without example in the line of the Pontiffs. The years of Peter have been supposed to be a bound beyond which no successor would pass. Pius IX. passes them this day. Let us consider, then, whether, in the times in which we live, there be anything exceptional; whether in the event we commemorate there be anything singular, and what is its moral purpose.

That these days are exceptional in the history of Christianity, I think no man with common knowledge of history and common candour of mind can doubt. We are, at this moment, in the midst of what may be called the century of revolution, the century of the upheaving, the shaking and dissolving of the foundations of Christian society. We are, at this time, in the presence of the most formidable anti - Christian powers the world has yet unfolded. This, then, is a time which certainly has upon it a character of its own; and, as I think we shall hereafter see, so exceptional as to mark the Pontificate of Pius IX. with a peculiar greatness. What, then, I purpose to draw out is this: that whereas in the twenty-five years that are past, the reigning Pontiff has exercised and fulfilled in himself all those prerogatives and acts which are common to his predecessors, there are some singular and exceptional acts and events which belong to him alone. No man of candid mind, meditating upon what I shall lay before you, can, I believe, fail to see that there is about the Pontificate of the last five-and-twenty years a peculiar character and significance, which manifests to the world in a more luminous and surpassing degree the sovereignty of Jesus Christ.

1. First of all, I may repeat the words which I have heard again and again from the lips of Pius IX.: ' We are in conflict with an anti-social and antichristian revolution.' The principles which threaten the Christian society of the world, which deny the sovereignty of Jesus Christ, have indeed been working for centuries, but there was never a moment when they had reached what I may call high-water mark so visibly as now; the powers of disorder were never so organised and widespread, so menacing, or so confident. I will not attempt, for time forbids me, to draw out the working of this anti-social and anti - Christian revolution in other countries: I confine what I have to say to Italy alone. Since the beginning of this century the principles of impiety, immorality, and anarchy, which had scourged and overturned the ancient monarchy of France, burst through the Alps like torrents of fire, with the invasion of the French armies. The whole length of Italy was devastated. The seeds and sparks of poison and conflagration were scattered broadcast. The Voltairian philosophy, with its mocking spirit, took possession of a multitude of the upper classes; secret infidelity spread among many who had not the courage to avow it; but what they had not the courage openly to avow, they had the malice secretly to propagate. With this came also an overthrow of the civil order of Italy. The old municipal institutions, which had grown for centuries, and which had adapted themselves to the genius of the people who lived under them, were swept away. New codes, new forms of government, for which they had no adaptation, were forced upon them. The new institutions in Italy planted seeds of disorder, with wide-spread discontent, and caused a constant chafing of the subjects against their rulers. For the last fifty years there has been a system, a subtil seditious organisation of political conspiracy, such as, for refinement and perversion, never existed in the world before. The autobiography of its chief master testifies that it has covered the whole of Italy, entering into all its cities, and spreading through every rank with its organised unity, and that it waits only the moment when it shall at once rise everywhere. This, during the past twenty-five years, has been culminating to its height. You remember its first outbreak in the year 1848, when the reigning Pontiff was driven from the city of Rome into exile. You remember the faithless and sanguinary invasion of the patrimony of the Church, which at Castelfi dardo wrung from the Holy See two -thirds of the patrimony of St. Peter. And finally, you remember the- 20th of September in last year, of which I feel confident you would rather that I should not add a word. At this moment, the Vicar of Jesus Christ is stripped of the last semblance of that power with which, providentially, he has been invested; of those possessions which God Himself in the order of His divine dispensation has bestowed upon the Vicar of His Son. When I say he is divested of the last semblance, I must correct myself. We have heard of guarantees which invest him with the' inviolability of a sovereign person. This is not a new device. We have read of a crown of thorns, and a purple robe, and a reed that was put into the hands of a Sovereign when He was hailed ' King of the Jews.' I think any one may see that the century of the anti - Christian revolution, of which Pius IX. has been the object, has reached, as I said, the mark of inundation beyond which it cannot go. This, then, is exceptional in his Pontificate.

2. I will take another point; it is a brighter and a happier one. In the whole of the line of Pontiffs there is not one that has ever drawn and bound to himself, by love and by confidence, the heart — I will not say the hearts, but the heart — of the whole Christian world with bonds more close, more intimate, and more fast, than Pius IX. Three times in the last twenty-five years, if not the whole Episcopate mathematically numbered, at least the whole Episcopate morally represented, obedient to the voice of his invitation, has come from the ends of the world, over land, over sea, from the four winds of heaven, to gather round his throne. The first time was when, in 1854, he did an act which alone would have made his Pontificate exceptional in history; that is, when, with the infallible voice of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, he defined the truth of the Immaculate Conception, which the whole world had already believed, and, when defined, received with joy from his unerring lips. The next time was when, in 1862, surrounded by the Bishops of the Church, he canonised a host of martyrs. Lastly, when, in 1867, on the eighteenth centenary of the martyrdom of Peter, a larger concourse of Bishops than was ever known in Rome, save only the great (Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, came again with the speed of gladness from the whole world to celebrate the martyrdom of the Prince of the Apostles. Do not think that these assemblies were mere ceremonies, festivals, or pageants. They were deep moral facts, and they had the effect of awakening the hearts of the pastors, if indeed they needed to be awakened, to a deeper attachment to the Catholic unity; they bound them to their Head with the intimacy of personal knowledge and personal converse, with the love and the attachment of sons who had spoken face to face with the Father of the Faithful. But when the pastors of the Church are united together, the people of the Church cannot be divided. The pastors of the Church are the bond of unity among the people. As every diocese centres in its bishop, so, when the pastor is united to his Head, the whole flock is united through him. Of this England is an example. The pastors of England are united with the Vicar of Jesus Christ with so intimate a bond of conformity in will and heart, that their people likewise have but one heart and will. That which we do here to-day is done in every church throughout this diocese; and in every church throughout England the pastors and flocks are united together in an acclamation of thanksgiving for the singular providence manifest in this anniversary.

3. But it was not only to the unity of the pastors and of the people to the Head of the Church on earth that the Bishops gathered in Rome bore witness. They recognised in Pius IX. the Head of the visible Church, the successor of the Prince of the Apostles, the Vicar of Jesus Christ, invested with plenitude of jurisdiction, and with plenitude of the faith, bearing the two keys of Authority and of Doctrine. It was a profession of faith as well as of love. I well remember when, in one of the Consistories, I saw before me some five hundred Bishops assembled together over the portico of St. Peter's, the thought came to my mind, ' This is the noblest senate that the world has ever seen. These five hundred men represent thirty nations, of divers tongues and races. They speak in the name of two hundred millions of men, and of the Universal Church of God.' And from that senate there came forth an acclamation, ' The words of Pius are the words of Peter: what thou teachest we teach; what thou condemnest we condemn.' From the hearts and from the lips of these five hundred men came forth a testimony which affirmed the Divine guidance whereby the Head of the Christian Church cannot err. But, because it was only an acclamation, and not a definition, those who knew how error winds its way, knew well that it was not enough. Nevertheless, in the history of the faith, I believe there has never been, save only in the Council of the Vatican, an act more majestic than this profession of faith in the name of the Universal Church amid the solemnities of St. Peter's martyrdom. And that which was begun on that day received its perfect accomplishment in a higher and more authoritative form. You have heard, even to weariness, of definitions by acclamation; you have heard the servants of this world endeavouring to cast suspicion upon those who desired to define the Infallibility of the Roman Pontiff, by accusing them of schemes to define it by acclamation, to take men by surprise. Let me assure those who so speak, that they who had part and lot in that work knew too well that the whole history of the Church is full of acclamations, from the Councils of Chalcedon and of Constantinople down to the centenary of St. Peter's martyrdom; they knew, too, that acclamations are not definitions offcfaith, and that the perverse and the unbelieving can evade an acclamation, but a definition they cannot escape. They well knew that the time was come, that the work must be done; and they resolved by God's help to do it. The Council met, and the work was done; and will stand to the end of the world. There is no need of my telling you, that on the day in which our divine Lord and Master on the coasts of Decapolis said, ' Thou art Peter; and upon this Rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it/ — that on that day^He created the Church and the Head of the Church, both indivisible, not only in His power, but in His truth. The infallibility of the Church and of its Head is contained in these words. The living and universal tradition of divine faith in all ages from the beginning of Christianity has taught, without wavering, that the dogmatic teaching of faith and morals by the Vicar of Jesus Christ is, by Divine assistance, preserved from error. There never was any man professing to be Catholic — and I was about to say, professing to be Christian, save only heretics and schismatics, who, in the fact of their heresy and schism, denied that Divine prerogative — there never was any man within the unity of the Church who ever dared to deny this special privilege of the Head of the Church, until the proud, worldly spirit of nationality, with the growth of modern languages and modern kingdoms, before the Council of Constance, arose to threaten the unity and authority of the Church of God. Then first sprang up this perverse error. From and after the Council of Constance — indeed, for some four hundred years and more — the Catholic Church was tormented by this subtil mischief; an error in those who knew no better; a heresy in those who, with eyes open, departed from the divine tradition of the faith. The spirit of nationality, which began to divide the Church in the Council of Constance, consolidated itself chiefly in France. And there, in the seventeenth century, was first shaped into form a specific denial of this divine truth. You know well, and I will therefore not dwell upon it, what have been the bitter fruits of the so-called Gallican liberties. They were the bondage of the Church, and the cause of its corruption, of the secularising of pastors, and of the neglect of the people. The salt lost its savour; and why? Because national pride and the power of kings paralysed the spiritual action of the Church by usurping upon the supreme prerogatives of the Vicar of Christ. In more than one country of Europe this spirit of insubordination, and of intellectual error, perverted many; and for two centuries error by tradition grew strong. Pius IX. therefore, in the Vatican Council, extinguished for ever all such national religions. TJhe Divine command to go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, brought in a higher unity, in which all nations are taken up and assimilated. Nationality in religion then passed away; and in Christ Jesus ' there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free;' all nations are elevated by the grace of faith in the supernatural unity of the mystical Body, in the light of which the nations walk, but within which they have no national jurisdiction. I say, that national religions are extinct for this reason. The national Gallicanism of France has passed away. England has national Christianity, indeed, but no national religion. The Catholic religion is not the national religion of England; neither is any other. National religions have passed away. Christianity remains, and I rejoice to know that the people of England cherish, as they cherish their life-blood, the tradition of their national Christianity. It is shattered, indeed. And may the Spirit of God in His power and love build up the breaches of its walls.

In the Council of the Vatican, then, the only two remaining subjects on which there was divergence of mind among some within the unity of the Church were closed. Those subjects were the constitution of the Church under the supreme jurisdiction of its Head, and the Divine guidance and preservation of its Head from error in faith and morals. In the Council of the Vatican, these points, which had been the matter of intellectual divergence in the mode of treatment, and in the manner of explanation, were closed for ever. It is the genius of the Church of God to close all open questions; it is the policy of human systems to leave disputed questions open. Such is the contrast between truth and error. Truth is intolerant of open questions. In all such there is an * ay' and a 'no;' there is a truth and a falsehood; there is light and darkness. Between these there is no fellowship. The divine Teacher and Witness of the truth is therefore intolerant of an open question; for an open question is doubt at best, and in faith doubt cannot be. In every doubt, on one side there is inevitably falsehood; and in the doctrines of faith there can therefore be no open question. We stand, then, in conflict with the world, face to face. The divine authority of Christ in His Vicar has closed the last divergence among the faithful, in the face of a world which is disintegrating every day by throwing open its religious opinions as insoluble. The world doubts, and the Church defines. This, then, once more, gives an exceptional character to the Pontificate of Pius IX. Other Pontiffs have, indeed, held General Councils, and defined doctrines in detail; but no other Pontiff has so excluded the principle of error by defining the supreme doctrinal authority of the Church.

4. There is, again, another subject, so large, so various, and so vital, that I hardly dare to touch it, because I must only touch it in passing; and cannot, therefore, treat it as I would. In all the line of Pontiffs, there is not one who, in the face of kings and lawgivers and peoples, has proclaimed the sovereignty of Jesus Christ in terms more full, more luminous, or more inflexible. The document conveying that message, in condemnation of the gospel of anarchy, which for the last century has tormented the Christian world, is the Syllabus; a word in the mouth of multitudes who never saw it; a word used for ridicule and contempt by those who have never read, and perhaps, if they had read, could not or would not understand it. And yet, to those who have the will to understand, the Syllabus is as clear as the light of day. What, then, is the Syllabus? The condemnation of atheism, of the abuse of reason, of the anarchical and rationalistic principles which are undermining the civil society of the world; the condemnation of the heretical and schismatical errors which are assailing the authority of the Church; the condemnation, in detail most profuse and most explicit, of the errors which are assailing Christian society, Christian and even natural morality, the domestic life, the indissoluble bond of marriage, the true progress and civilisation of mankind. If there can be found a document which reflects the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the legislation of the Sermon on the Mount, it is the Syllabus. And how was that Syllabus formed? It was not written in a day. It was not a composition drawn up by a commission charged with its preparation. It is nothing more than a collection of the vigilant and successive condemnations of errors which, in a Pontificate of seventeen years, from time to time, in particular nations, schools, and men, have arisen to threaten the faith and morals of the Christian world. Pius IX., as the chief Pastor, Guardian, and Witness of the faith, sitting in the seat of Peter, and, as St. Leo says, on the watch-tower, casting his gaze over the whole Christian world, wheresoever he has discerned the rise of an error, has at once condemned it; and the collection of these condemnations, eighty in number, is what is called the Syllabus. We all remember, when that document was published, the storm and tempest with which it was received. It reminds us of a passage in our own history twenty years ago — which, I believe, many Englishmen would blot out of the records of England — when unreasoning violence took possession of the minds of calm and reasonable men, and carried them to unjust and unreasonable actions. The uproar twenty years ago published the founding of the Catholic Hierarchy in England. Men, women, and children, were thereby made aware with a living consciousness of the supreme act of the Vicar of Jesus Christ. That storm and tempest served the purpose against which it raved. The storm and tempest against the Syllabus has done likewise. It is a rule of canon law, that the acts of the Pontiffs need nothing but promulgation to biird the conscience. The Pontiff issues an act, and the world, by its opposition, gives it promulgation. We have now reached a time when that Syllabus has its justification.

There are two diseases which have been paralysing the life of Christian society; the one calling itself Liberalism, and the other lately named Communism. They are elder and younger brothers; their relation is of intimate consanguinity; and those who begis with the principles of what is called Liberalism, if they were logical (as happily most men are not), would not stop short of the principles of Communism. We hear men calling themselves Liberal Catholics; that is, Catholics under reserve. It is not we who fix the name upon them; they attach it to themselves. It is a name and a title of which they are proud, and for which we are thankful; for they write upon themselves the words, ' Beware of these men.' If there can be found a justification of the Syllabus in any event or in any one place rather than in another, it is in the terrible and visible scourges of the Divine hand, which have fallen upon the city in which the publication of the Syllabus was forbidden, and a Bishop of the Church was reprimanded because he published it, for an abuse of power. I will not enter farther into this, which would be a painful, and perhaps a wounding subject. But it may well be said, that no Pontiff, from the beginning, has done more to save the foundations of the Christian world from anarchy, to forewarn kings, princes, and legislators, to arouse people to be on their guard, lest the creeping cancer of revolution, drawing atheism and the ruin of Christian morality in its train, should undermine their homes and their national welfare.

I have but one more point to add. Those of which I have spoken are clearly exceptional in the Pontificate of Pius IX.; but I can conceive that some men might contradict or might try to evade what I have said. No one can deny or evade what I am going to add. Pius IX. to-day exceeds the period that any other Pontiff has attained since the martyrdom of Peter, and by to-morrow will exceed the years of Peter. This is not without a purpose. It is not in man to prolong life. God alone, the Giver of life, can sustain and prolong it. And He has prolonged it; and I may use of Pius IX. the words of holy Scripture: ' The sun has not hasted to go down,' but standms ' ' still in the midst of heaven;' ' As the sun when he shineth, so he shines in the temple of God.'1

The splendour of his life and his example, unclouded and clear, stands out in the eyes of the Christian world. These twenty-five years have been the unfolding and manifestation of the character of Pius IX. I enter into no details, but I will affirm that the whole of his Pontificate is an exhibition of three things so luminously, and I may say so articulately, that they have spoken to the intellect and to the heart of the Christian world. He has been emi- 1 1 Ecclus. i. 7.

nently a Pontiff of justice, standing for justice against injustice; a Pontiff of inflexibility, standing in the midst of a yielding and compromising world; a Pontiff of charity, full of tender and generous love, not only for his children, but for his enemies, in the midst of a world in which charity has grown cold. The manifestation of that character has won to him not only his own children, to whom his pastoral tenderness is best known. Every one who has been brought into contact with him — and many who hear me, no doubt, have knelt at his feet — can bear witness of his paternal love. I know, from the lips of those who are not in the unity of the Church, that they never entered into the presence of any man who has made upon them so profound an impression of true sovereignty and fatherly goodness as Pius IX. I have heard this from old statesmen and old diplomatists, whose experience had brought them in contact with the sovereigns of their time in all the nations of Europe. There goes forth from him a benign influence which has touched even his enemies. Throughout the Christian world the name of Pius IX. is venerated for justice, inflexibility, and charity.

Now, is all this without purpose? Is this without any design? A Pontiff who, for twenty-five years, has stood immovable against the flood of anti-social and antichristian revolutions, standing alone without fear; a Pontiff who has gathered round about him the pastors of the Church, and bound them to his person, and, through them, their people in one world-wide flock, over which he is the one supreme Shepherd upon earth; a Pontiff who has extinguished the intellectual divergences which before marred the perfect unity, not of Catholic faith indeed, but of Catholic thought; a Pontiff who has defined, by the supreme authority of the Church, those prerogatives with which the Son of God invested His successor; a Pontiff who has preached to the kings and the peoples of the world the gospel of order; the limitation of authority, the duty of obedience, for the conservation of Christian society, as no other ever has; and lastly, who has outlived the years and the time of all, save only the Prince of Apostles, — I ask you, is all this without purpose? No, assuredly; in the history of the Pontiffs there is not one who has so made the world to' feel the sovereignty of Jesus Christ, who has so made men to acknowledge whether they will obey or no, that there is a power greater than man on earth, an authority higher than all human authority among men; ruling still, though disobeyed, striven against, but reigning on, and with a power which shall last for ever.

All that I would at present deduce from this is, that God has permitted the Vicar of His Son upon earth, who in the words of the Psalmist may he called ' the man of His right hand, whom He has confirmed,' or made strong, ' for Himself,' to he stripped of all earthly things — of possessions, of power, and of protection. He literally stands alone, without protector, without defence. There was never any Pontiff since his Master stood alone in Jerusalem, who has been more completely abandoned by the powers of this world.. In past ages, if one sovereign forsook the Vicar of Christ, another was faithful; if one people rose against him, another stood up in his defence. But now, there is not a sovereign in the world that utters a single word in behalf of the rights of the Vicar of Jesus Christ; of that sovereign who was before them all; under whose shadow they have grown up as it were but yesterday. Who was it that consecrated their ancestors, and confirmed the laws of their kingdoms? They once regarded him as the keystone of the sovereignty of the whole civilised world. And yet there is not now a sovereign or a prince who at this moment speaks one word for the Vicar of Jesus Christ. God has so permitted it. But alas for them! The peoples of the world still recognise him as the Vicar of Jesus Christ, the successor of Peter, the Head of the Church of God, for which they would give their lives. The day is coining when the peoples of the Christian world will do what the princes will not. God, when He means to work with His own hand, pushes aside the hands of all men; and when He begins to work, He works with the least exercise of His power. The touch of His almighty finger is enough to create a world. He is preparing for the manifestation of His will. He is dissolving one by one the antagonists who have disobeyed Him. Empires have crumbled, kingdoms will; emperors have fallen, and kings may not long stand. All antagonistic powers are passing, the winds of confusion will sweep them away; and then will be God's time, when the faith of the Christian world shall move men to do the justice of God.

If there be one thing more than another for which Pius IX. has inflexibly stood these twenty-five years, it has been the liberty of the Church of God. He cares nothing for provinces, or for cities, or for revenues, or for royal state. 'Temporal Power,' as it is called, is the providential order, the clothing, whereby the liberty of the Church has been protected. The Head of His Church on earth has been liberated from all civil superiors, that he might stand in the freedom and power of God alone. That conflict for which the great St. Gregory VII. (whom we commemorate to-morrow) stood through all his stormy Pontificate; that great warfare for which our glorious martyr St. Thomas of Canterbury gladly shed his blood, was for the liberty of the Church of God, the liberty of its spiritual power, of its judicial authority, of its guiding voice, and of its supernatural law. In these its liberty is contained; in its liberty also its purity of faith and morals, and its power to sanctify the nations of the world. For this through the twenty - five years of his Pontificate Pius IX. has stood. The cause is God's. The world has thrown down the gauntlet, and the Son of God has taken it up, and that defiance is now in the Hand that was pierced on Calvary, but can be no longer nailed. The Christian world seems sick unto death, but it will not die yet; this sickness is that the Son of Man may be glorified thereby. The time is not far off when the prophecies and promises of God will have their sure fulfilment. He said, by the prophet Jeremias, speaking to His Church of old, and through it to the Church of Jesus Christ, and to the Head of the Church both in heaven and earth: (I will make thee to this people as a strong wall of brass, and they shall fight against thee and shall not prevail >' for I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee

... out of the hand of the wicked, and I will redeem thee out of the hands of the mighty.'2 And again He said, by the prophet Isaias: ' And the multitude of all nations that have fought against Ariel shall be as the dream of a vision by night, and all that have fought and besieged and prevailed against it. And as he that is hungry dreameth and eateth, but when he is awake his soul is empty; and as he that is thirsty dreameth and drinketh, and after he is awake is yet faint with thirst and his soul is empty; so shall be the multitude of all the gentiles that have fought against Mount Sion.'3 And, lastly, God says to the Vicar at His side: ' Fear not, thou worm of Jacob, you that are dead of Israel; I have helped thee, saith the Lord and thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel. I have made thee as a new threshing wain with teeth like a saw: thou shalt thresh the mountains and break them in pieces, and shalt make the hills as chaff; thou shalt fan them, and the wind shall carry them away... and thou shalt rejoice in the Lord, in the Holy One of Israel thou shalt be joyful.'4 For the Vicar of Jesus Christ is the servant and the witness in this world of Him to Whom the words were said: ' Sit thou on My right hand until

1 make Thine enemies Thy footstool.'

2 Jeremias xv. 20, 21. 3 Isaias xxix. 7, 8. * Ib. xli. 14-16.