No more interesting spectacle is there in the world, to my eyes, than the aspect and attitude of the French Church. Fifty years after such an overthrow as no other Church ever survived, behold forty thousand priests at work, under eighty bishops, in the great task of winning back their country to the faith. Despoiled of all territorial power, of all political authority as priests, of the possession even in fee of a single church, parsonage, or palace; reduced to a state of even apostolical poverty, and receiving a miserable salary paid as to merchants' clerks by the government; with a temporal power jealous of all spiritual influence, and the whole mind of the nation infected with infidelity--year after year they are winning ground, they are making themselves felt; they present a front before which even the tyranny of centralisation pauses in its career, counts ever and anon the cost of the conflict, and recoils from its aggression. In the very midst of the corruptions of Paris we are told that fifty thousand converts, the pure gold of the Church, exist as a centre which is ever drawing more around them. Infidelity itself talks of the religious movement, and fears it, and would fain expel its most tried and valorous champions--two hundred destitute men, who begin their profession by the renunciation of their goods. How is all this done? What power is this which makes its way against such tremendous odds? If any fact was ever patent in history, it is this--let us not be ashamed to own it--_it is the power of the Cross_. The bishop, residing in a palace which he has not the funds even to keep in repair, with a smaller income than a little tradesman or a country attorney, has no other channel for his cares and affections than those five hundred priests, who, with the pay of day-labourers, yet charged with the intimate knowledge and perilous guidance of souls, look up to him as their head and support, their defender and champion. And in every village there is one at least, linked to earth but by a spiritual tie, a member of a great hierarchy, through whom the Redeemer rules visibly on the earth. He is cut off from almost all participation of temporal things, but the larger is his portion of things spiritual: he reflects, in his degree, the true Melchizedek. Removed from us but by a narrow strait we see bishops at 400_l._ a year, archbishops at 600_l._, bound to celibacy, truly ruling their clergy, serrying their ranks against the enemy, and fearing nothing, were it but that they have nothing to lose; standing, where the bishop ought to stand, in the first ranks against the attacks of infidelity. There, again, the priest detached from all human ties, representing in his life already that state where they neither marry nor are given in marriage, in his spiritual character greater than all other men, in his temporal condition lower than most.