The horrors of the French Revolution, the universal breaking up of society it involved, the persecution of the Church and of her clergy, and her religious, which it shamelessly introduced in the name of liberty, the ruthless war it waged upon religion, virtue, all that wise and good men hold sacred, not unnaturally, to say the least, tended to create in the minds of the clergy and the people, who remained firm in their faith, and justly regarded religion as the first want of man and society, a deeper distrust of the practicability of liberty, and a deeper horror of all movements attempted in its name. This, again, as naturally tended to alienate the party clamoring for political and social reform still more from Catholicity; which, in its turn, has reacted with new force on the Catholic party, and made them still more determined in their anti-liberal convictions and efforts. These tendencies, on both sides, have been aggravated by the European revolutions and repressions, till now almost everywhere the lines are well defined, and the so-called Liberals are, almost to a man, bitterly anti-Catholic, and the sovereigns seem to have succeeded in forcing the issue: The Church and Cæsarism, or Liberty and Infidelity. Certainly, as religion is of the highest necessity to man and society, infinitely more important than political freedom and social well-being, I am unable to conceive how the Catholic party, under the circumstances, could well have acted differently. Their error was in their want of vigilance and sagacity in the beginning, in suffering the political Cæsarism to revive and consolidate itself in the State, or the sovereigns, in the outset, to force upon the Catholic world so false an issue, or to place them in so unnatural and so embarrassing a position. The truth is, the Catholic party, yielding to the sovereigns, lost, to some extent, for the eighteenth century, the control of the mind of the age, and failed to lead its intelligence--they who should always be first and foremost in every department of human thought and activity.