ruin is explored, all monuments are studied, traditions are interrogated, inscriptions are deciphered; Asia conceals not her doctrines, Egypt explains her mysteries, and Nineveh opens to our inspection the annals and gigantic remains of her civilization.
Man, in presence of these wrecks of ages and of empires, inquires what power produced those revolutions, and vivified that dust; he perceives that doctrines animated those people and fashioned those monuments, and he discovers in their relation with truth, the causes of their grandeur and their decay. Then, beyond time, appears to him Eternity in which God reigns and governs all things. Life, light and power emanate from his throne, and the Church distributes them to intelligent creatures. All those laws written and effaced, those forms of government that are modified, those dynasties which pass, are exterior phenomena which have profound causes. The inner life of humanity is in Religion and her saints are the true princes of the world. Providence gives them to mankind according to its necessities, and charges them with the execution of its will. Hence they occupy an important place in the field of history, and whosoever wishes to explain events, without considering their agency, will necessarily fall into grave errors.
Saint Catharine of Sienna was to the fourteenth century, what St. Bernard was to the twelfth; that is, the light and support of the Church. At the moment in which the bark of St. Peter is most strongly agitated by the tempest, God gives it for pilot a poor young girl who conceals herself in the poor shop of a Dyer. Catharine sets foot in the territory of France, to lead the Sovereign Pontiff Gregory XI, from the delights of his native land; she brings the Popes from Avignon to the
