Never did the shadows of night gather with more sorrow and hopelessness around the afflicted Spouse of Christ, than on that sad August 29, 1799, when, in the prison house of Valence, the form of the gentle Pius VI. lay still and cold in death. Gazing out from that Chamber of silence, upon the races of men, she might well be tempted to apply to the troubled world that expression whereby the prophet characterized the abode of eternal misery: _Ubi nullus ordo, sed sempiternus horror inhabitat_; "where no order, but sempiternal horror dwelleth." Politically, all Europe was in a frenzy of hope and despair, of triumph and defeat, of luxury and of poverty. The directing reins had been torn from the hands of government, and wild, uncouth, savage, insane mobs held high carnival over the ruins of desecrated homes. In the Sanctuary itself the forces of disorder had pushed their way, Jansenist, Gallican, Josephist and every other form of fanatical heresy fighting for possession of those altars from which they had driven the ministers of the living God. The Church, indeed, had been so utterly buried beneath the accumulated ruins of her external institutions, and so utterly prostrated through the humiliations poured out upon her, that a triumphant world was almost forgetting that she was, indeed, a power to be dealt with. And now, when the news that her visible head was laid low, was spread abroad, the exultation of anti-Christianism knew no bounds. In Paris, in every dark alley and lane, as well as in the halls of the mighty the voice of congratulation was heard, for that he, who had stood forth a barrier against the immoral slavery of whole peoples to the passions of the demagogue and the anarchist, was now silent forever. Jacobin, Constitutionalist, Jansenist, Gallican, Caesarist and Protestant, all united in the conviction that Catholicity was at an end, and that the superannuated institution of the Papacy had fallen into a grave from which no power human or divine might ever again resuscitate it. They had forgotten the promise made by Christ of old: "For, behold, I am with you all days even to the consummation of the world."