ROME AND CATHOLICS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 223, 10 August 1877, Page 5

ROME AND CATHOLICS.

Writing of " France and Belgium," the London Saturday Review has given immediate and unlooked-for confirmation of one of the reasons for the petition, on the Roman Question, of the Edinburgh Young Men's Society. In " contrast to the predictions which used to be common some five-and-twenty years since," that the world was advancing to "a commercial millennium," in which it was " for the most part to be content with a creed which it called Christianity, and which was made up in about equal parts of the pleasanter side of Christian morality and the more obvioas results of free-trade," the Reviewer assures U3 that "since the age of the Reformation there never has been anything corresponding to the existing state cf intellectual Europe. The disintegration of religious belief has undoubtedly gone on much more rapidly and thoroughly than was expected. But, instead of having the effect of bringing men together in a kind of languid acceptance of the substitute most popular at the moment, it has arrayed them, into two camps, each of which is daily going forth to the fight and shouting for the battle. The Papacy, though its temporal dominion has disappeared, holds a religious sway more potent than it has exercised for centuries. ... In France a Catholic reaction is going on before which political passion grows pale. Nothing is talked of, nothing is thought of, but religion, and, no matter in what a controversy begins, it is sure to end in theology. Even the destruction of the Pope's temporal power, which at one time seemed as complete as that of the Holy Roman Empire, is no longer acquiesced in. Catholic hopes of its restoration are no longer set down by the wiser heads of the Church as mere pious fancies; they are accepted as counters having a certain positive value in the game." The Reviewer evidently makes the mistake of imagining that the destruction of the temporal power ever was acquiesced in, but he is right in thinking that the moment has come when silent protest should become loud and active, advocating its restoration. — Catholic Times.