DK rJlKSSENSK ON MEN AND PARTIES. 173 



part of those ^vhosc prime mission it is to teach the truth — who 

 li;vve solemnly sworn to ilefend it !" These courar^eous opponents 

 have no hesitation in chari,nni; the new dogma with heresy. " As 

 it inchules," say they, " all corruptions, so it leads inevitably to 

 the demand tor radical and complete reformation. The time 

 allows neither comi)romisc nor delay. When open attack made 

 upon the revelation of God is manifest, submission is not obe- 

 dience, but apostasy, and renunciation of the Christian faith." 

 ]\Dr. Bordas Demoulin and Iluct said aloud what was thou;,dit 

 or muttered by many othere. 



The most energetic protest was that of an old priest, the xVbbc 

 Laborde, a man universally respected, who, on the announcement 

 of what was preparing at Ivome, started for the centre of Catho- 

 licity, imagining, in his simplicity, that the voice of truth would 

 get a hearing among the princes of the Church, even though ite 

 mouthpiece were only a humble country vicar. He carried to 

 the Pope a brief and forcible paper, entitled " The Belief in the 

 Immaculate Conception cannot become a Dogma of Faith" {La 

 croi/ance â V IinmacuKû Conception ne peut devenir un dogme de 

 foi). The stor}' is well worth reading, of the persecutions to 

 which he was subjected by the papal police. Hunted as a crimi- 

 nal, he w^as at last shipped for France by violence, and returned 

 thither to die on a hospital pallet, where, with his dying hand, 

 he finished a last protest against the new errors. It is a light 

 thing that the righteous man's complaint is unheeded on the 

 earth— it has been heard in heaven ; and the sentence pronounced 

 by him on his deathbed against the usurpations of the papacy, is 

 confirmed by God himself: it shall not be annulled. 



Political events, in their swit\ progress, have come up to involve 

 the internal crisis of Catholicism in singular complications. The 

 gravest of these events was the war in Italy, which prostrated in 

 the Peninsula the power of Austria, the natural protector of the 

 papacy. The latter, speedily bereft of some of its fairest prov- 

 inces, menaced in the possession of the rest, that were still strug- 

 gling under its yoke, naturally took the most violent attitude 

 toward the new kingdom of Italy, \Thich it had openly exc»m- 



