the revolution under Espartero, its monasteries suppressed, and their quiet inhabitants dispersed to starve or die. How the Papal States were seized upon, the Pope dispossessed, the Church denuded, the religious institutions destroyed, and everything devoted to God confiscated, and that mainly for the benefit of adventurers who have plundered the whole of beautiful Italy, no one knows better than Mr. Gladstone. But it must be kept in mind that every one of these acts was defended by the speech and pens of men who, to exhibit some shadow of reason for their perpetration, invoked the names of liberty, modern civilisation, and progress.
All the errors above intimated,—whether anti-rational or rationalistic, whether anti-Christian or pantheistic, whether subversive of the Church or of civil society—for the secret societies, the revolutionists, and the communists were undermining states and destroying thrones—whether opposed to Christian marriage or to Christian education,—whether subversive of the rights of conscience or of established Christianity,—all these it became the sacred and solemn duty of the Popes to expose, denounce, and mark with their censure as anti-Christian errors. Not only had these numerous errors and irreligious acts to be noted and denounced in defence of religion and for the instruction of all Catholics, but likewise the false pleas and the deceptive language by which, under the pretence of.freedom, civilization, and progress, these monstrous assaults upon truth, upon morality, upon religion, upon civil order, upon established rights and possessions, were in speech and innumerable writings defended. Against a combination of adversaries and adverse cir-
