With whom will victory rest, and which of the two principles shall carry captive the other in its triumph, so as to decide definitively the character of this epoch? That is a secret as yet only known to God, and it is not mine to attempt a reply to so hidden and mysterious a question. What I do know is, that we ought to oppose, with all our might, those who, wishing to bring about a violent retrograde movement in European society, threaten every day to carry us back to the age of Voltaire, and who present to us the saturnalia of '93 as the ideal of liberty, prosperity, and progress!
What I know, again, is, that but yesterday the antagonism between these two opposing powers (_des deux cités_) was personified in two men, upon whom, if I mistake not, the judgment of posterity has already begun to be made up: One of them, who represents, in all his serene majesty and with impressive authority even in his weakness, the force of right--the august and mild pontiff, whom twenty-two years of revolutions and ingratitude do not dishearten and dissuade from blessing the world, and calling down, by his prayers, upon sorely tried and troubled society, the spirit of wisdom, counsel, and peace; the other, that incorrigible leader of the antichristian army, the man of those bold deeds whose ephemeral triumph aspires to build up right upon force, but which one day, I hope, Italy will disavow in the name of her religious traditions, as well as in the name of her true and sound liberal traditions.
No; this nineteenth century, where by the side of so much that is evil there is so much that is good--so many generous sallies of self-devotion, so many hidden acts of self-sacrifice, so many solid virtues--the century which has given us a Curé of Ars and a Pius IX., an Affre and a Lamoricière, a Lacordaire and a Ravignan, an O'Connell and a Zamoyski, a Jane Jugan--founder of the Little Sisters of the Poor--and those students to whom not only France, but the Catholic world, are indebted for the institution of the Conferences of St. Vincent of Paul; this century will never be dragged down to the _gemoniae scalae_ [Footnote 17] of history with the ignominious stamp upon it of having been the _Era of Garibaldi_. It will triumph over all the obstacles heaped upon its pathway by scepticism, by false science, and by the violence of party-spirit. These adverse forces seem at this hour, it is true, to take up with renewed energy the struggle which for eighteen centuries nothing has interrupted; but by so doing they only serve to show us more clearly our duty, and to urge us on the more strenuously to fulfil it.