The pages of history point out in other centuries dangers to the existence of the church equal to those of the present crisis, through which she passed with safety and renewed strength. A master-pen in word-painting has given a picture of one of those critical periods, all the more striking as the events which it portrays are within the memory of men still living, and also because the writer is famed for anything rather than Catholic leanings. “It is not strange,” he says, “that in the year 1799 even sagacious observers should have thought that at length the hour of the Church of Rome was come, an infidel power ascendant, the pope dying in captivity, the most illustrious prelates of France living in a foreign country on Protestant alms, the noblest edifices which the munificence of former ages have consecrated to the worship of God turned into temples of victory, or into banqueting houses for political societies, or into theophilanthropic chapels. Such signs might well be supposed to indicate the approaching end of that long domination. But the end was not yet. Again doomed to death, the milk-white hind was still fated not to die. Even before the funeral rites had been performed over the ashes of Pius VI. a great reaction had commenced, which, after the lapse of more than forty years, appears to be still in progress. Anarchy had had its day. A new order of things rose out of the confusion, new dynasties, new laws, new titles, and amidst them emerged the ancient religion. The Arabs have a fable that the Great Pyramid was built by antediluvian kings, and alone, of all the works of men, bore the weight of the Flood. Such as this was the fate of the Papacy: it had been buried under the great inundation, but its deep foundations had remained unshaken; and when the waters had abated it appeared alone amid the ruins of a world which had passed away. The republic of Holland was gone, the empire of Germany, and the great Council of Venice, and the old Helvetian League, and the house of Bourbon, and the parliaments and aristocracy of France. Europe was full of young creations—a French Empire, a kingdom of Italy, a Confederation of the Rhine. Nor had the late events affected only territorial limits and political institutions. The distribution of property, the composition and spirit of society, had, through great part of Catholic Europe, undergone a complete change. _But the unchangeable church was still there._”[1]