_Ex Oriente lux; ex Oriente
gaudia seraglii!_ It is in our blessed epoch that atheism, by some, and
pantheism, by others, are boldly taught and vindicated, as once they
were by Greeks or Orientals, and with an earnestness and enthusiasm very
different from the sneer with which Encyclopaedists of Voltaire's time
attacked Christianity and Deism. To prove, however, the magnificent
many-sidedness of our noble times, it is we that have returned once more
to pictures of the Virgin Mary with winking and with weeping eyes, or
to her apparitions talking _patois_, as that of La Valette, and to a
hundred things in the Church, cautiously passed over _sub silentio_ in
the last century, but now joyously proclaimed and sustained with defiant
erudition by English and German _doctores graces_, and by the Parisian
"Univers," which, openly rejoicing in the English blood spilt by
the Sepoys,--for it is but Protestant blood, and that of hateful
freemen,--heralds the second or third advent of universal love
and Papacy. It is in our age that representative, and indeed all
institutional government, for the first time, is called effete
parliamentarism, a theatrical delusion, for which, according to the
requirements of advanced civilization, the beneficent, harmonious, and
ever-glorious Caesarism, _pur et simple_, must be substituted, as it
was once sublimely exhibited in the attractive Caesars of Rome, those
favorites of History and very pets of Clio.
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