and to bid them stay at home, and not be gadding abroad, running over the country and spouting nonsense, free love, infidelity, impiety, and blasphemy, at suffrage conventions and other gatherings, at which it is a shame for a woman to open her mouth, or even to be present; and, most of all, to exercise a vigilant censorship over ideas, whether vented in books, journals, or lectures, and to keep from the public those which tend to mislead the mind or corrupt the heart, as a prudent father strives to keep them from his children. The age needs for this the _Catholic_ Church. A national church cannot do it; far less can the sects do it. These all depend on the public opinion of the age, the nation, or the sect, and have no power to withstand that opinion. This is perhaps better understood here than elsewhere. The sects, being creatures of opinion, have no power to control it, and their tendency is invariably to seize upon every opinion, excitement, or movement that is, or is likely to be, popular, and help it on as the means of swelling, when it is at flood-tide, their own respective numbers. A national church has undoubtedly more stability, and is not so easily wrested from its moorings. But it has only the stability of the government that ordains it, and the most absolute government must sooner or later yield to the force of opinion. Opinion has disestablished and disendowed the state church in Ireland, and will, as is most likely, do it ere long in both England and Scotland. The Protestant sects have no alternative; they must either yield to the dominant opinion, tendency, or passion of the times and move on with it, or be swept away by it. It is only a church truly catholic, that depends on no nation, that extends to all, and is over all, that derives not its being or its strength from the opinion of courts or of peoples, but rests on God for her being, her law, and her support, that can maintain her integrity, or have the courage to stand before an age or a nation, denounce its errors, and condemn its dominant passion or tendency, or that would be heeded, if she did. It was only the visible head of the Catholic Church, the vicar of Christ, that could perform the heroic act of publishing in this century the Syllabus; and if, as we are confident they have, the prelates assembled in the Council of the Vatican have some share of the courage of their chief, their decrees will not only draw the attention of the world anew to the church, but go far to prove to apostate nations and truculent governments that she takes counsel of God, not of the weakness and timidity of men.