As to the future of Catholicity, we are under no apprehensions. We know that never can the church be in this world the church triumphant, and that she and the world will always be in a state of mutual hostility; but the hostility can never harm her, though it may cause the spiritual ruin of the individuals and nations that war against her. The Protestant world have for over three hundred years been trying to get on without her, and have succeeded but indifferently. Sensible and earnest-minded men among Protestants themselves boldly pronounce that the experiment has failed, which most Protestants inwardly feel, and sadly deplore; but like the poor man in Balzac's novel, who has spent his own patrimony, his wife's dower, the portion of his daughter, with all he could borrow, beg, or steal, and reduced his wife, his children, and himself to utter destitution, in the _recherche d'absolu_, they are buoyed up by the feeling that they are just a-going to succeed. But even this feeling cannot last always. Hope too long "deferred maketh the heart sick." It may be long yet, and many souls for whom Christ has died be lost, before the nations that have apostatized learn wisdom enough to abandon the delusive hope, and turn again to Him whom they have rejected, or look again, weeping, on the face of Him whom they have crucified. But the church will stand, whether they return or not; for she is founded on a rock that cannot be shaken, on the eternal truth of God, that cannot fail. The Protestant experiment has demonstrated beyond question that the very things in the Catholic Church which are most offensive to this age, and for which it wages unrelenting war against her, are precisely those things it most needs for its own protection and safety. It needs, first of all, the Catholic Church--nay, the papacy itself--to declare and apply the law of God to states and empires, to sovereigns and subjects, kings and peoples, that politics may no longer be divorced from religion, but be rendered subsidiary to the spiritual, the eternal end of man, for which both individuals and society exist and civil governments are instituted. It needs the church to declare and enforce the law, by such means as she judges proper, that should govern the relation of the sexes; to hallow and protect marriage, the basis of the family, as the family is of society, that great sacrament or mysterious union, typical of the union of Christ with the church, which is indissoluble; to take charge of education, and to train up, or cause to be trained up, the young in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, or in the way they should go, that when old they shall not depart from it; to teach maidens modesty and reserve, and wives and mothers due submission to their husbands and proper care of their children; to assert and protect the rights of women; to train them to be contented to be women, and not to aspire to be men, or to usurp the functions of men,