Made stingless by the spirits of the Lord.
And blood-red rainbows canopied the land.
Spirit! no year of my eventful being
Has pass'd unstain'd by crime and misery,
Which flows from God's own faith. I've marked his slaves
With tongues whose lies are venomous, beguile
The insensate mob, and whilst one hand was red
With murder, feign to stretch the other out
For brotherhood and peace; and that they now
Babble of love and mercy, whilst their deeds
Are marked with all the narrowness and crime
That freedom's young arm dare not yet chastise?"

Protestant Christians may urge that all this is not Christianity; if
it be not--for it is the record of the Church--I would ask, what is?
and where shall we find the history of Christianity for the fifteen
centuries before Luther's time? and where, to-day? Their predecessors
plucked the plumage from the dying bird of mythology, as they,
themselves, have robbed the liberal orchard of all its choicest fruits
and palmed them off as of their own growth. Protestants would not, I
dare say, now countenance the persecutions of the past, but yet, I
would tell them that their Protestantism has been a great mistake; and
that, at this moment, there is no unity among the opposers of
Catholicism, who are split into a thousand sects, wrangling for
superiority, like wolves over offal; and that their churches are
gradually converging toward Rationalism on the one hand, and Catholic
Sacerdotalism on the other; in regard to which last, the Historical
Roman Church--the only Christian body which presents a solid
phalanx--one must not be too iconoclastic, remembering that, in the
monastic houses and great ecclesiastical libraries we have had