Chapter IV. Catholicity. 45 habitable globe were represented at the Council. The Bishops assembled from Great Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Switzerland and from almost every nation and principality in Europe. They met from Canada, the United States, Mexico and South America, and from the islands of the Atlantic and the Pacific. They were gathered together from different parts of Africa and Oceanica. They went from the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, the cradle of the human race, and from the banks of the Jordan, the cradle of Christianity. They traveled to Rome from Mossul, built near ancient Nineveh, and from Bagdad, founded on the ruins of Babylon. They flocked from Damascus and Mount Libanus and from the Holy Land, sanctified by the footprints of our blessed Redeemer. Those Bishops belonged to every form of government, from [035] the republic to the most absolute monarchy.66 Their faces were marked by almost every shade and color that distinguished the human family. They spoke every civilized language under the sun. Kneeling together in the same great Council-Hall, truly could those Prelates exclaim, in the language of the Apocalypse: "Thou hast redeemed us, O Lord, to God in Thy blood, out of every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation."67 What the Catholic Church lost by the religious revolution of the sixteenth century in the old world she has more than regained by the immense accessions to her ranks in the East and West Indies, in North and South America. Never, in her long history, was she numerically so strong as she is at the present moment, when her children amount to about three hundred millions, or double the number of those who bear the name of Christians outside of her communion. 66 Does not this fact conclusively demonstrate the truth that the Catholic Church can subsist under every form of government? And is it not an eloquent refutation of the oft repeated calumny that a republic is not a favorable soil for her development? 67 Apoc. v. 9.