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to be denied. It is strange that, with the immutability of the Church, and the 'progress,' as it is vaunted, of society before their eyes, men should charge upon the Church the responsibility of breaking its relations with society. The Church at one and the same time is accused of immobility and of change. It is not the Church which has departed from unity, science, liberty; but society which has departed from Christianity and from faith. It is said: 'If Christian unity be destroyed, if science have separated from faith, if liberty choose to reign without religion, a terrible share of the responsibility for these evils rests upon the men who have represented in the Christian world unity, faith, and religion.' Does this mean, upon the Episcopate, Councils, and Pontiffs? Who, if not these, 'have represented in the Christian world unity, faith, and religion'? Have they, then, misrepresented these things to the world? If so, who shall represent them? and where, then, is the Divine office of the Church? The Pontiffs have been for generations lifting up their voice in vain to warn the governments of Christendom of the peril of breaking the bonds which unite civil society to the faith and to the Church. They have maintained inflexibly, and at great suffering and danger, their own temporal dominion, not only for the spiritual independence of the Church, but for the consecration of civil society. But the governments of the Christian world would not listen; and now a General Council meets, and the place where, as at the Lateran, at Florence, and at Trent, they would have sat, is empty. The tendency of civil society everywhere is to depart further and further from the