To appreciate the height of authority on which the _Civiltá_ stands, the reader should bear in mind the fact that in 1866,[3] after it had already for sixteen years been recognized as the organ, at one and the same time, of the Pope himself and of the Company of Jesus to which its editors belonged, his Holiness in a brief and by a declared exercise of apostolic authority, formally erected _in perpetuity_ the Jesuit Fathers who composed the editorial staff into a _College of Writers_, which college should be under the General of the Society of Jesus, but, it is added, so "as to Us and to Our successors shall seem most expedient." In this brief the Pontiff recorded, as to the past, the "exceeding gladness of soul" he had felt in witnessing the labour, erudition, zeal, and talent with which the _Civiltá_ had "manfully protected and defended the supreme dignity, authority, power and rights" of the Apostolic See, and had "set forth and propagated the _true doctrine_." He also recorded the fact that all this had day by day more and more merited the "goodwill, esteem and praise," not only of the hierarchy, but of men of the greatest eminence, and of all the good. This, coming at a time when the expositions of the Encyclical and Syllabus given by the _Civiltá_ had awakened among Liberal Catholics serious opposition and even alarm, was decisive as to what was, at Rome, held to be the _true doctrine_, and as to who were held to be its real teachers. As to the future, the Pontiff, adopting the well known motto of the Company of Jesus, decreed that, _for the greater glory of God_, the writers should, as we have said, constitute _in perpetuity a college_ possessing peculiar rights and privileges. As if formally to claim some share of this glory, the Jesuit editors of the _Stimmen aus Maria Laach_, when in 1869 commencing a new series, notified on their title-page the fact that they availed themselves of the labours of the _Civiltá_--a liberty which no Jesuit durst have taken without the highest sanction. All the numbers of the _Civiltá_ and of the _Stimmen_ being under my hand, they have yielded a steady light by which to examine opinions relating to the movement of "reconstruction," whether those opinions were hostile or sympathetic. The Italian journal, the _Unitá Cattolica_, and the French one, the _Univers_, written with a consciousness of the highest favour on the one hand and of an overwhelming influence among the clergy on the other, comment upon the operative clauses of official documents--generally intelligible only to the initiated--in forms more popular than those of the two great magazines. But it is only by the still clearer comment of daily narratives and polemics that the elucidation becomes complete.