In June, 1846, the death of Gregory the Sixteenth, and the election of Cardinal Mastai and his elevation to the Papacy, under the name of Pius the Ninth, summoned us to Rome, the Eternal city. I felt a momentary grief, as I saw the mouldering ruins of pagan Rome, the ancient capital of Gentilism, and felt indignation at beholding the diminutive Rome that had supplanted it; but I felt sure that the old gods lingered still in those ruins of the Capitoline and Palatine hills, and that the time was drawing near when we might evoke Jupiter Tonans and the fiery Mars, and the Goddess of Victory, from their slumber of centuries; revive the old Roman spirit, and reëstablish the old Republic, so long triumphed over by the barbarism of the cross. Never before had I felt how thoroughly alienated from the Christian world, and assimilated in my feelings to the old Gentile world I had become. I was in the capital of the Christian world, the centre of Christian art, and of the most glorious Christian associations for two thousand years, and my heart was touched only at sight of the monuments of pagan antiquity, which time and the still more destructive hand of man had spared. But we had no leisure for sight-seeing, and still less for sentimentalizing over the ruins of that stupendous superstition of which Rome was the capital, and which had gradually supplanted the patriarchal Christianity, only slightly corrupted, of the primitive Romans. The superficial politicians, Catholic and non-Catholic, regard the Papacy as comparatively of little political or social significancy in our times; but whoever looks a little below the surface of things, knows very well that the Pope, though weak as to his temporal states, is not only the oldest but the most influential sovereign in Europe. The death of one Pope and the accession of another, is an event which reverberates through the whole civilized world; and the policy of the sovereign pontiff, the feeble old man of the Vatican, with hardly a regiment of guards, has not seldom the preponderating weight in the councils of princes, although unseen, unrecognized—so much the more inexplicable, as there no longer remains a truly Catholic government on the globe, and not a Catholic nation in whose heart lives and breathes the old Catholic faith. Not a nation in Europe would, to-day, for the sake of religion alone, rush to the assistance of the Pope; yet the Papacy is everywhere, and not a court in Europe but trembles when it thinks of the Pope, even weak and unsupported as he is.