I accept your good wishes from my heart, but I remit their verification to the hands of God. We are in a moment of great crisis. If we look only to the aspect of human events, there is no hope; but we have a higher confidence. Men are intoxicated with dreams of unity and progress, but neither is possible without justice. Unity and progress based on pride and egotism are illusions. God has laid on me the duty to declare the truths on which Christian society is based, and to condemn the errors which undermine its foundations; and I have not been silent. In the Encyclical of 1864, and in what is called the Syllabus, I declared to the world the dangers which threaten society, and I condemned the falsehoods which assail its life. That act I now confirm in your presence, and I lay it again before you as the rule of your teaching. To you, venerable brethren, as bishops of the Church, I now appeal to assist me in this conflict with error. On you I rely for support. When the people of Israel wandered in the wilderness, they had a pillar of fire to guide them in the night, and a cloud to shield them from the heat by day. You are the pillar and the cloud to the people of God. Here the bishops learned, with the full weight of pontifical authority, that the Syllabus was "the rule of their teaching." Some explained the Syllabus as affecting discipline, and therefore liable to alteration. The _Civiltá_ and the _Slimmen_ had always asserted that it was purely doctrinal, and therefore above all change. In pronouncing it the "rule of teaching" the Pope settled that vital point. Some, again, had been tempted to think that the Syllabus might be laid up, like an ancestral weapon; they were undeceived, and given to know that it must be tested in war. Such were placed in the dilemma of having to offer resistance to the sovereign thus surrounded, or of having to observe a silence which must ever after carry the effect of consent. Even if they did not feel with the Pope, that the foundations of universal society were crumbling in unprecedented decay, they did keenly feel with him that the foundations of his own temporal power were crumbling. Every doubter held his peace, and the Pope's act became virtually what, as we shall see, in a few days it became formally,--the act of the whole episcopate. The Pope is not fortunate in quoting Scripture, often showing that he takes glosses for the text. He imagines that the "cloud by day" was not a pillar before the host, but an extended field of clouds overshadowing the wide-spread multitudes and not merely the tabernacle. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 73: _Centenary of St. Peter_, p. 6.] _BOOK II_ _FROM THE FIRST PUBLIC INTIMATION OF A COUNCIL TO THE EVE OF THE OPENING_ (_June 1867 to December 1869_) CHAPTER I