Oh, fatal supineness! unworthy a rational being, defeating the end of our creation, and entailing countless miseries here and hereafter. Nothing can be hoped for from the world, till it awakes from its lethargy of indifference. Men must be men before you can make them Christians--serious, thoughtful earnest men, before you have any reason for expecting them to become Catholics. There is more hope of a conscientious bigot, than for a man indifferent to his salvation. He, at least, is in earnest. If his mind should become enlightened, if he should recognise the Catholic Church as the divinely-appointed guide to that heaven which he is seeking, there is reason to hope that he will avail himself of her blessings. He will not make frivolous objections; he will not stumble at the Sacrament of Confession, or catch at every scandalous story of immorality on the part of a Catholic, or quarrel with every minute ritual arrangement; but in a better, higher, nobler spirit, in that spirit of obedience which so well becomes a man, in that spirit of faith, in which man's reason asserts most clearly its high character, by uniting itself to and embracing the Reason of God, when he finds that the Church is the guide to his immortal destiny, he "_will come bending to her, and will worship the steps of her feet, and will call her the City of the Lord, the Sion of the Holy One of Israel_." {278} And now, to turn our eyes within the Church, we can in the same way account for those dreadful apostasies from the Catholic faith which are here and there recorded in history. Mahometanism, which in numbers is a rival to Catholicity, possesses some of the fairest lands once owned by Christ. In modern times, one of the most refined and enlightened nations of Christendom, in a moment of frenzy, threw off the faith with which her history had been so adorned, and professed Atheism. Now, how did these things happen? Not of a sudden, or all at once. Men are not changed from Christians into Turks or Infidels in an hour. There must have been some secret moral history, which accounts for this wonderful change. And so there was. Men became lax in their conduct. The Catholicity they practised was not the Catholicity of Christ and the Apostles. Public morals were conformed to the standard of heathenism rather than that of the gospel--nay, sometimes outraged as much the decencies of heathenism as the precepts of Christ. It was the old story. St. John the Baptist imprisoned by an adulterous king; St. John the Baptist, conspired against and murdered by an ambitious queen; the head of St. John the Baptist, eloquent and reproachful even in death, brought in to point the jest and stimulate the revelry of a lascivious feast--this is but a figure of the treatment which conscience has received in Christian courts, and at the hands of Christian princes. Morality and decency grew out of date, and were cast aside like old-fashioned garments, and the restraints of the Law of God were