heroically as did these great men, but you can at least strive to catch their spirit and answer, even if it be from afar: "Behold, I come: I come from the East of my self-indulgence to offer to the King of life the gold of charity, the incense of prayer, and the myrrh of mortification. I come to Him who said: 'Follow me, for my yoke is sweet and my burden is light, and you shall find rest to your souls'; the rest of peace here and the eternal rest hereafter which shall be ours when we hear his last call: 'Come, ye blessed of my Father.'"

THE PAPACY AND WORLD PEACE

BY THE HON. MICHAEL J. RYAN

As representatives of a great fraternal organization you have assembled in your splendid numbers at this formal public opening of your annual convention.

For a generation you have quietly and unostentatiously pursued the even tenor of your ways-ways that, guided by the precepts of your holy religion, have led through boundless fields of kindliness and charity and have made real, as the bone of your bone and the flesh of your flesh, the vital principles of your ancient Church: love of your neighbor, love of your country, and love of your God.

Though your society messages in its distinctive name kinship with and memory and affection for the fatherland, yet we meet to-night and we live our whole existence in this mighty Republic, founded, built, and preserved by the sacrifices and valor of our fathers, as Americans; and measured by any test, we deny to any claimant priority of title.

More than one hundred and forty years ago, before the Declaration of Independence had been written, Thomas Paine, in his great essay, Common Sense, declared: "Europe, not England, is the Mother Country of America." That statement was true then and is vastly truer now, and the infamous attempts which are being made to link this Republic in an unholy alliance with the nation that " ravaged our coasts, plundered our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people "; that burned the capitol in Washington in 1814 and destroyed the

records of the infant Government; that encouraged Texas to refuse to enter the Union and urged it to set up as an independent State; that recognized the Southern Confederacy as a belligerent and supplied it with the guns, the bullets, and the munitions of war to destroy the Union; that vilified Lincoln even to the morning of his martyrdom; that through its pirate privateers like the Alabama and the Florida swept our merchant marine from the seas and robbed us of the carrying trade of the world those infamous attempts at alliance, repugnant to the patriotism of the great heart of the overwhelming masses of the plain people of America, will fail; and remembering the injunctions of Washington and Jefferson, America will pursue untrammelled its way of righteousness and peace and independence.

Your convention assembles in sorrow. While your homes,. your fortunes, your interests, and your futures are here, yet linked by ties of human affection your hearts go out to the battlefields of Europe and you grieve with German mother for German son and German brother and German father, dead in French valley or on Russian plain. The mystic chords of memory are touched, and none more fervently than you can send up your prayers that this chalice of suffering shall pass away and that God in His mercy shall give to all His people peace.

"Oh, the depths of the riches of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! How incomprehensible are His judgments and how unsearchable His ways. For who hath known the mind of the Lord? Or who hath been His counsellor? Or who hath first given unto Him and recompense shall be made him. For of Him and by Him and in Him are all things; to Him be glory forever."

Friends, the world is looking at the mightiest conflict that

God's sun has ever shone upon. Battles have been and are being fought upon the seas and soils of four continents. In the air and beneath the waters the conflict rages. Forces, weapons, and energies unknown until now are invoked and millions of men in death grapple give the living lie to the teachings of the gentle Christ.

Yet is not this struggle of the Titans but a consummation and logical ending to what is called the "modern progress of the recent years, with its deifying of science and materialism and its studied indifference to the commandments of God?

Canon Barry has recently written:

"In the most enlightened age since civilization began, man has forgotten God. The world has denied its Creator. The nineteenth century, into which most of us now living were born, put God aside. Some men were atheists, more were agnostics; millions upon millions did not care whether God was or was not, whether they themselves were more than machines doomed like the beasts to perish, whether right differed from wrong except in name. Profit and pleasure were the only things worth seeking; heaven and hell were fairy tales. Such has been the great deadly sin of modern nations with its consequences clear as the sun. Luxury and frivolity, moral decay, an infected society, an art and literature abounding in shameful fancies, a world on the down grade."

And now there has followed this cataclysm, and with armies and peoples and nations and races on the threshold of eternity there has come a resurgence of the flood tides of faith, and men are turning their agonized gaze upon the Man-God throned upon Calvary. The wellsprings of devotion are gushing again, and in the plenitude of their sorrows their hearts are being warmed with the hot red tide of the sacred Blood of the Jesus, whose miracle birth was heralded by the angel choir's message of "Peace on earth to men of good will," and who dying in His agony for all mankind — the bond, the free, the Jew, the Gentile, the Roman, the barbarian - prayed: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

"Restore all things to Christ" is the aim of the Catholic Church. It teaches the oneness and the unity of all mankind. It teaches the equality and nobility of all the sons of men, for to it all men are brethren and all are sons of the common Father. It teaches everywhere and always-to-day, yesterday, and forever - the same Gospel of its God Founder. Its altar stones are planted in every land, and the incense of its Sacrifice mounts upward in every clime. In unbroken line for nearly two thousand years it traces back to Deity, and from God the mandate came in obedience to which it has never faltered: "Go, teach all nations, baptizing in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." It has seen empires, nations, and dynasties rise and fall, thrones crumble, and whole races and peoples disappear; and blazing in living fire through the ages, century after century attesting more strongly its truth, is His promise—against it the "Gates of hell shall not prevail" and " Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world."

The sermon on the mount it has sought to make through all its history the life-guiding creed: "As you would that men should do unto you, do you unto them in like manner "; and man's duty it sums up: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and with thy whole soul and with all thy strength, and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."

Peter, the first of the Popes, raised his voice in protest against the vices of imperial Rome, and though martyrdom was his portion and the catacombs the refuge of the faithful, the power of the Cæsars crumbled and the Cross rose in triumph. Down through the centuries it has sought to draw the souls of men to God. Its appeals have been to the individual and its battlegrounds have been the human conscience and the human heart. It has been the barrier against tyranny and