how to deal with Regales, Sicilian monarchies, and Organic Articles.
(6.) Lastly. Why should it seem to be the vision of a dreamer to hope that from these things may arise a new order, and a new Christian world? Christendom is not more sick and shattered now than it was when S. Gregory went to his rest. He died mourning over its apparent dissolution; and yet all the glories of the Christendom of a thousand years arose out of the ruins over which he sorrowed. The world is always changing, rising and falling, swaying to and fro like the currents of the great deep. Kingdoms, empires, confederations of Christian States, have formed, dissolved, and passed by together. The Church alone stands steadfast and changeless. It has withstood, and it has made new relations with, a Byzantine, a Frankish, a German Empire, with Christian Europe, in its gradual rise, its many vicissitudes, its perpetual instability. We are but in a new crisis of the old work and conflict. A new European order, with new frontiers, new centres, new powers, new dynasties, may spring up around the See of Peter; and the Pontiffs, calm and changeless in their supremacy, will enter into new relations with a new world, upon old laws which are changeless as the succession of seasons and of tides. We are not shaken nor alarmed by revolutions. We protest against them; we may be crushed by them; but we rise again. The Sovereign Pontiff, in the last proposition of the Syllabus, condemned the pert audacity of those who call upon the Pope to
