Wonderful thing! The city of Rome received from that politics the heaviest blow it had ever suffered. Christianity was successful under Constantine; but it was Oriental Christianity. In building a new Rome on the Bosphorus, Constantine made the old Rome the capital of the West alone. The cataclysms which followed, the invasions of the barbarians who spared Constantinople, and fell upon Rome with all their weight, reduced the ancient capital of the world to a limited and often humble condition. That ecclesiastical primacy of Rome which burst with so much effect upon the second and third centuries flourished no longer when the Orient had an existence and a separate capital. Constantine was the real author of the schism of the Latin Church and the Church of the Orient. Rome took its revenge, principally by the seriousness and depth of its spirit of organization. What men were St. Sylvester, St. Damasus, and Gregory the Great! With an admirable courage they labored for the conversion of the barbarians, attached them to themselves, and made them their friends and subjects. The master-work of its politics was its alliance with the Carlovingian house, and the bold stroke by which it re-established in that house the empire which had been dead three hundred years. The Church of Rome rose again more powerful than ever, and became again the centre of all the grand affairs of the Occident during eight centuries. * * * * * Here my task is ended, gentlemen. You will confide to others the care of recounting the prodigious history of the feudal church, its grandeurs and its abuses. Another still will show you the re-action against these abuses,--Protestantism returning to the primitive idea of Christianity, and dividing, in its turn, the Latin Church. Each one of these grand historical pages will have its charm and its instruction. What I have recounted to you is full of grandeur. One is impartial only to the dead. Since Catholicism was an inimical power, a danger to the liberty of the human mind, it was right to oppose it. Our age is the age of history, because it is the age of doubt upon dogmatic matters: it is the age in which, without entering into the discussion of systems, an enlightened mind says to itself, "If, since right exists, and so many thousand symbols have made the pretension of presenting the complete truth, and if this pretension is always found vain, is it indeed probable that I shall be more happy than so many others, and that the truth has awaited my coming here below in order to make its definite revelation?" There is no definite revelation. It is the touching effort of man to render his destiny supportable. But its reward is not disdain, it is gratitude. Whoever believes that he has something to teach us concerning our destiny and our end should be welcome. Recall the account in your old histories of the judicious and discreet words of the Saxon chief of