Chapter IV. True and False Progress.

I Will now go on to the fourth proposition—that by these collisions with the Church the Civil Powers everywhere are at this time destroying the first principle of their own stability.

Mr. Gladstone has represented me as saying that the civil order of all Christendom is the offspring of the Temporal Power, and has the Temporal Power for its keystone; that on the destruction of the Temporal Power "the laws of nations would at once fall in ruins."'

Understood as I wrote these words I fully affirm them; understood as they may be in this garbled form, they have an exaggeration which is not mine. I was speaking strictly of the Temporal Power of the Pope over his own State: whereby, as a King among Kings, he sustained the Christian character of Sovereignty. I was not speaking of Temporal power over the Temporal Government of Princes. And I was speaking in defence at a time when every journal in the country, with hardly an exception, was day after day assailing, and I must add misrepresenting, the origin and office of the Temporal Government of the Pope. My own words were as follows:— page 129

'Now, the last point on which I will dwell is this: that as the Church of God has created—and that specially through the action of the Supreme Pontiffs in their civil mission to the world—this vast and fair fabric of Christian Europe, so it has perpetually sustained it. I ask, what has given it coherence? What is it that has kept alive the governing principle among men, but that pure faith or knowledge of God which has gone forth from the Holy See, and has filled the whole circumference of Christendom? What has bound men together in the respect due to mutual rights, but that pure morality which was delivered to the Church to guard, and of which the Holy See is the supreme interpreter? These two streams—which, as St. Cyprian says in his treatise on the unity of the Church, are like the rays that flow from the sun, or like the streams that rise and break from the fountain—illuminated and inundated the whole Christian world. Now, I ask, what has preserved this in security', but the infallibility of the Church of God vested chiefly and finally in the person of the Vicar of Jesus Christ? It will rather belong to the next lecture to note how, by contrast, this may be proved, and how those nations, which have separated themselves from the unity of the Catholic Church, and therefore are in opposition to the temporal sovereignty of Rome, have lost these two great principles of their preservation. I ask, then, what has preserved Christian Europe, but the principle of obedience—the precept of submission, which has been taught throughout the whole of its circuit by the Church of God, especially through the mouths of its Pontiff's? By them subjects have been taught obedience and rulers have learned justice. What, I ask, has limited monarchy? What has made monarchy a free institution, and supreme power compatible with the personal liberty of the people, but the page 130 limitations which the Holy See, acting through its Pontiffs, has imposed upon the Princes of the world? Does anybody doubt these two propositions? To them I would say, the Pontiffs, with their temporal power, have been accused of despotism; at least, then, let us give them the credit of having taught the people to submit. They have been also accused of tyranny over Princes: at least let us give them the honour of having taught Kings that their power is limited. The dread chimera at which the English people especially stands in awe,—the deposing power of the Pope,—what was it but that supreme arbitration, whereby the highest power in the world, the Vicar of the Incarnate Son of God, anointed high-priest and supreme temporal ruler (i.e. as Sovereign in his own State), sat in his tribunal impartially to judge between nation and nation, between people and prince, between sovereign and subject? The deposing power grew up by the providential action of God in the world, teaching subjects obedience and princes clemency.

'Now, in this twofold power of the Popes, which has been, I may say, the centre of the diplomacy of Christian Europe, we see the sacerdotal and royal powers vested in one person, the two powers of king and priest, which are the two conservative principles of the Christian world. All Christian kings and all Christian priests stand related to the one person who bears in fulness that twofold character; and it is by adherence to that one person as the centre of the civil and spiritual system, which grew up under his hand, that Christian Europe is preserved. I should say further, that, vast and solid as Christendom may seem, like a vault of stone, the temporal power of the Pope is the keystone; strike it out, and the family of nations would at once fall in ruins.'¹

In the very same chapter from which Mr. Gladstone has quoted, at page 46, the following statements occur at pages 32 and 33:—

(1) 'Our Divine Lord committed to His Church and to His Vicar—the head on earth of that Church—His Spiritual sovereignty, reserving to Himself His Temporal or providential sovereignty. . . . Therefore the Spiritual sovereignty of the Church is a Divine institution, and has a power directly ordained of God. (2) There are other powers in the world which are indirectly ordained of God—viz. all temporal sovereignties. . . . . (3) By an indirect but Divine providence our Divine Lord has liberated His Vicar upon earth, in the plenitude of His Spiritual sovereignty, from all civil subjection. . . . (4) By the same Providence—indirect, indeed, but nevertheless Divine—our Lord clothed His Vicar with the possession of a patrimony. . . . . (5) Upon the basis of this temporal possession our Lord has raised a temporal power by His indirect operation, and therefore the temporal power of the Pope is a Divine ordinance, having a Divine sanction, at least equally with every other sovereignty in the world.'¹ It may not be amiss to add, lest it should be thought that this statement is merely a private opinion, that the text from which I quote was translated into Italian, in Home, in 1862, was examined by the censorship, and printed at the Propaganda press.

This is still my unchanged belief, confirmed by the twelve years since these words were spoken, and by the shattered state of Christian Europe in 1875. Now I am not afraid of defending the condensed statement of Donoso Cortes: 'The history of Civilisation is the history of Christianity; the history of Christianity is the history of the Church; the history of the Church is the history of the Pontiffs.' St. Augustine's work De Civitate Dei is enough to prove that the civilisation of the old world had run itself out by incurable corruption, and that the civilisation of the modern world is the new creation of Christianity. Two other witnesses would also prove this: St. Paul in his first chapter to the Romans, and Dr. Döllinger in his work on 'The Jewish and the Gentile Nations.' I am indeed one of those who still believe that we owe Christian homes to Christian marriage, that we owe Christian men to Christian homes, that we owe Christian nations to Christian men, and that the transmission of national Christianity depends on Christian education. We owe, therefore, the civilisation of Europe to Christian nations, and we owe the whole, not to 'modern thought,' but to Christianity.

Moreover, I know of no agent by which Christianity was thus brought to bear upon mankind but the Christian Church; and, lastly, the heads of the Christian Church were the chief legislators, guides, judges, and protectors of this Christian page 133 civilisation. I cannot think that Mr. Gladstone would deny this, or that we have read history, all this while, in an inverted sense.

But there is another sense in which the Temporal Power of the Popes—that is, their local sovereignty—has in an especial manner created modern Europe. To them and to the Civil Government of the Patrimonies of the Church, when the Byzantine Empire had ceased to protect the West, may be ascribed the Christendom of which Charlemagne was the first Temporal Head. From that germ the Christian civilisation of Europe has been propagated by Christian marriage, Christian education, and Christian faith. Until 'Luther's mighty trumpet' was blown it was bound together by unity of faith, unity of worship, and unity of jurisdiction under one Head, and that Head united in himself the twofold character of Christian Pontiff and Christian King. Luther's blast has brought this down at last. First, by regalism in Protestant nations; and, secondly, by revolution in Catholic states. The principles of 1789 are Lutheranism applied to politics. We have already reached the time of civil marriage, of secular education, and of States in their public life without Christianity. But let us not think that we have reached our place of rest. Luther's blast, I fear, has yet more to do. Faith is dying out of the public life and action of all Governments. There is hardly a Catholic or a Christian Government left. The people they govern are divided in religion, page 134 and 'the religious difficulty' forces them to become simply secular in legislation and in action. So long as there was a Christian world, the Head of the Christian Church was recognised as the Vicar of a Divine Master, and had a Temporal Power among Christian Sovereigns, and a sovereignty of his own; but now that the nations have become secular, and no longer recognise his sacred office, his direction in temporal things is rejected by their rejection of faith. I am not arguing or lamenting, but explaining our actual state. And what is now the state and condition of the Christian world? Where are the Christian laws which formed it in the beginning? I was not far wrong in saying that the Temporal Power of the Head of the Christian Church was the keystone of a world which has crumbled from its Christian unity into a dismembered array of secular and conflicting nations, of armed camps and retarded maturity. And it is with this 'progress and modern civilisation that the Roman Pontiff is invited to conform and to reconcile himself.' This is the sum and exposition of 'modern thought,' save only that it omits the Agnostic theology. De Deo non existente, and the anthropology of Apes. Mr. Gladstone quotes this condemned proposition, recited in the Syllabus, as a gravamen against the Pope and the Catholics of these kingdoms. We have no desire to see the Christian Commonwealth of England decompose before our eyes under Luther's blast. We are content with the English Monarchy, founded and page 135 consolidated by our Catholic forefathers; and with our English Constitution, of which the solid and unshaken base and the dominant constructive lines are Christian and Catholic. We Englishmen were once perfectly one in faith. Luther's blast has given us nearly three hundred years of penal laws, bitter contentions, a 'bloody reign of Mary,' a relentless shower, indeed, between two seas of blood, in the reigns of her father and her sister; and when these horrors relaxed, streams of blood still flowed on for another hundred years. For nearly three centuries we have been divided in politics, because politics were mixed up with religion. Our Legislature teemed with penal laws such as the world had never seen, and that against nearly a half of the English population. We were weakened because we were divided; haunted by suspicions of conspiracy, and scared by fancied dangers, because we were consciously doing wrong, as Prussia is at this day. But now for fifty years we have had peace, because we have common interests, and a solid common weal. The three Kingdoms are without anxiety and without fear. And why? Because we have eliminated religious conflicts from our Legislation, because we have learned to be just, because we have learned also that the Civil Ruler may punish what men do, but not what men think, unless they issue in acts against the State. All men, so far as conscience and faith extend, are now equal before the law. No man is molested for his religion. Although this is page 136 not the golden age of unity in truth, which the Christian Church once created and Pius IX. declares to be the only civilisation and the only progress to which he can conform himself, though he tolerates what he cannot cure; nevertheless, it is a silver age in which we can peacefully accept what we cannot either justify as the will of God, or extol as the normal state of the Christian world. In our shattered state of religious belief and worship there is no way of solid civil peace, but in leaving all men free in their amplest liberty of faith. It is because this is vital to our welfare as an Empire, and because, as it seems to me, the late sudden and needless aggression on the Catholic religion is dangerous to the social and political tranquillity of these Kingdoms, that I have pointed to Germany, as a warning. A monarchy of a thousand years is a majestic thing in this modern world of fleeting dynasties and of chronic revolutions. We possess a royal lineage the least broken and the most closely united to the people that the world has ever seen, save one. The line of Pontiffs ruled before the crowned heads of to-day came into existence. It has been the vital chord of the Christian people of the world. Next after the line of Pontiffs, there is nothing in history more time-honoured or grander than the Monarchy of Alfred, which reigns to this day. Does Mr. Gladstone think that the Vatican Council binds me to desire its overthrow? Next to seeing again the laws and the faith of good King Edward restored page 137 throughout the land, we desire to see the Sovereign of England reigning by equal laws over a people united at least in everything that is right and just and lawful in this world, if indeed they must still be in higher laws and truths divided.

One thing is most certain, Catholics will never lend so much as a finger or a vote to overturn by political action the Christianity which still lingers in our public laws. They will cherish all of it that remains in our popular education. If we could see the tradition of our national Christianity healed of its wounds and taken up into the full life and unity of perfect faith by the spiritual forces of conviction and of persuasion, as that supernatural unity was created in the beginning, we should rejoice with thanksgiving; but no Catholic will diminish by a shade the Christianity which still survives. We cannot, indeed, co-operate by any direct action to upheld what we believe to be erroneous; but it will find no political hostility in us. They who wish its overthrow would pull it down not for what we think erroneous in it, but for what is true; and what is true in it we revere as the truth of God. In our divided religious state the public revenues, once paid into the treasury, have passed beyond the individual conscience. Thenceforward they fall under the impartial administration of our mixed commonwealth. I am not responsible for the application of them. My conscience is not touched if public revenues are given to a Presbyterian or to a Baptist School. My conscience page 138 is not ill at ease even if grants are made to a school in which no religion at all is taught. A people divided in religion pays its taxes, and a Parliament divided in religion votes the public money by an equitable balance for our manifold uses in the midst of our manifold divisions. No one has a right to control this mixed administration to satisfy his private conscience, or to claim to have it all his own way. No Secularist can regard my schools with more aversion than I regard his; but I am passive when he receives his share of the public money. I trust the day will never come when any one section or sect among us shall gain a domination over the equities which render tolerable our divided state. I hope no Puritans will rise up again to do in England, by the help of Secularists and unbelievers, what they did in Maryland. There they destroyed the fairest promise of peace that a wrecked world ever saw. England at this time is Maryland upon an imperial scale. He who shall break our religious peace will go down to history with those whose names Englishmen try to forget.

It is for this reason that I lament when six millions of British subjects are told by a voice of great authority that they are loyal indeed, but in spite of their religion. When men are so taught they are very apt to learn the lesson. They will be ready to say, if by my whole life I am loyal, but by my religion. I ought, as I am told, to be disloyal, I am, therefore, page 139 either a traitor or a heretic. If I am a heretic I shall lose my soul; but for imputed treason I can only lose my life. If men of Mr. Gladstone's age and fame say these things, the masses will be very apt to believe them. And if he should also say that Pius IX. and the whole Episcopate, and the Vatican Council, and the Clergy of England and Ireland, so believe and teach, I can hardly find fault with a plain man who says, 'Your arguments and quotations are above me, but I know that the Pope and the Church cannot mislead me; they must know the Catholic faith better than you. At all costs I must believe them.' I could not blame such a man in refusing for so obvious a reason to listen to Mr. Gladstone when he expostulates with the Vatican Council. Indeed, I can conceive that it will not promote loyalty in England or Ireland to hold up passages from books written even by me in proof that Catholics must choose between their loyalty and their religion. They may be more likely to choose to err even with me than to correct their faith at the voice of any politician. Moreover, they may even be tempted to think that if I am not loyal they need not be. It is a dangerous thing to tell a flock of many millions that the Pastors they trust are, or ought to be, disloyal. They will be apt to say, 'We do not understand it; but if it be true, there must be some very strong and sufficient reason.' I can conceive that the Catholic peasants in Germany may have argued in this plain way, even before page 140 they understood the merits of the cause. They saw the Archbishop of Posen carried off to prison. Depend upon it their confidence went with him. This is playing with edged tools, and in a matter where it is hardly moral to play at all. Great public disasters might be caused by the game, and the costs of the game would fall, not upon the gamester, but upon innocent men, and women, and children.

I could not refrain from saying thus much of England. But I have little fear that the stream of our equal legislation will be turned aside, much less turned back; or that our public peace will be broken. The destinies of the British Empire are in strong hands, guided by calm heads, and supported by a balanced and steady public opinion, which in the last two months has manifested a self-command and an equity which do honour to our country.

As to Germany I shall say no more. Luther's mighty trumpet has already rung twice through Germany. It rang long and loud from 1535 to 1542, and again longer and louder from 1618 to 1648. The old Germany that heard it has ceased to exist.¹ God grant that it may not give such notes again. Everyone who bears a human heart, and a love for the Christian world and a good-will to Germany, will share in this desire.

But if the conflicts of Governments against the Church are fatal to the public peace and to them-

¹ See Archbishop Trench's Gustavus Adolphus, pp. 88, 89, 161.

page 141 selves, as assuredly they would be to the British Empire if our accusers should rekindle old strifes, and as they assuredly will be in the German Empire, whether the policy of Prince Yon Bismarck fail or succeed, there can be found no sadder example of this disastrous imprudence in statesmen than in the case of Italy. For eight and twenty years a wanton and mischievous aggression against the Holy See has been carried on. I say wanton, because it has been without. a cause. I say mischievous, because it has retarded and endangered the unity and independence of Italy, and the public and private prosperity of the Italian people. As Mr. Gladstone has reviewed his relation to the Italian question in its bearing on his Expostulation, I may do the same.

At the outset of their task of unifying and vindicating the independence of Italy, the Italian politicians began by assailing the principle of all unity among men. They engaged all the pride and all the passion of Italy in a deadly conflict with the special source of all its greatness. Had they worked from that centre of their moral life, Italy at this day would have been united, peaceful, and strong. These are, indeed, my convictions, but not my words. Neither the present party which rules Italy, nor the party which has encouraged them in this country, will, perhaps, listen to me. But they will listen, I hope, to one who was an Italian, and a lover of the unity and independence of Italy. Vincenzo Gioberti, in page 142 his 'Primato degli Italiani,' after proving that religion is the source of all civilisation, says:—

'If, then, the whole culture of a people has its impulse and origin from religion, how can we treat of its culture without speaking of its religion? If the culture of Europe in general, and that of Italy in particular, were the work of the New Rome and of its belief, how is it possible to discuss this twofold argument, and to be silent about Catholicism and about the Pope? In writing a book upon Italy I protest that I desire to speak of the living and real Italy as it exists at this day, not of the Italy that is dead these fourteen hundred years, nor of an abstract allegorical Italy that is not to be found in the outward world, but only in the brain of some philosopher.' . . . 'Italy is differenced from the Gentile nations by its Christianity; from those that are in heresy and schism by its Catholicism; and from the other nations which are Catholic by the fact that it is placed in the centre of Catholicism, and not in the outline or circumference.' ....'But among the Catholic populations, the Italian has the privilege of occupying the first place, because it possesses in its heart the first See.

'I hope that these suggestions will be enough to justify the small amount of theology that I have put into this book. . . . . Two facts seem to me conspicuous in the political (civile) world at this day' . . . 'the first is the exclusion of the Theology of Revelation from the field of the Encyclopedia of human knowledge; the second is the removal of the Catholic clergy from the influence in civil affairs.' . . . . 'I count it to be the duty of a writer, above all if he be a philosopher, Catholic and Italian, to combat these two grand aberrations of modern civilisation, and to recall things to their first principles; endeavouring to restore the universal primacy of religion in the circle of things and of knowledge.' . . . . page 143 'I therefore do not believe that I deceive myself in affirming that every scientific reform is vain, if it do not make chief account of religion, and that every scheme of Italian renovation is null, if it have not for its base the cornerstone of Catholicism.'¹

Such was the estimate of a man who loved Italy with all his heart, and desired to see it united, and independent of all foreign dynasties.

This is no mere speculation as to what the Catholic religion and the Pope may be to Italy, but a strict historical fact. The Pontiffs have been for fourteen hundred years the chief popular power in Italy. I say popular, not dynastic; not despotic, but Guelf. In the fifth century the Pontiffs saved Italy from the Gothic invasions. St. Innocent I. saved Ravenna and Rome. St. Leo saved Italy from Attila, and Rome from Genseric. In the sixth and seventh centuries St. Gregory was the chief defender of Italy and Rome against the Lombards. The same is true in the time of Gregory II. and Adrian I. In the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries the Pontiffs Leo IV. and Gregory IV. saved Italy from the Saracens. So also John VIII., John X., Benedict VIII. beat back the Saracens, and finally drove them from Sardinia. The Crusades of Urban II. and St. Pius V. saved Italy and Europe from the Mohammedan Power. In the great contest about Investitures, the Pontiffs, from Gregory VII. to Calistus II., saved the Church from subjection to the Empire, and Italy from subjection to Germany. The ecclesiastical and political liberties of Italy were both at stake, and were both vindicated together by the action of the Pontiffs. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the liberty of the Italian Communes was saved from the feudal despotism of the Hohenstaufen by the Popes. Alexander III. and the Lombard League defended popular liberty against Frederick Barbarossa. The City of Alexandria is to page 146 this day the monument of the gratitude of the Lombard people. The City of Cæsarea has ceased to exist. Innocent III. and the Tuscan League saved the liberties of Central Italy. Gregory IX. and Innocent IV. resisted the tyranny of Frederick II., and finally saved the independence of Italy from the Imperial despotism. Then came the contest of the people and the Empire, the Guelfs and the Ghibellines. In these conflicts the Popes and the people were indivisible. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Popes were the soul and the strength of the Italian Leagues, whereby the people and their liberties were protected from the enormities of tyrants and adventurers and Free Companies. In the fifteenth century Nicholas V. maintained peace among the Princes and people of Italy, and drew Naples, Milan, Florence, Venice, and Genoa into a Confederation to maintain the Italian independence.

Pius II. protected, in like manner, the liberty of Italy from the intrusions of France. Paul II. leagued together all the Princes of Italy in defence of Italian freedom. Julius II. laboured to drive all foreign domination out of Italy. Leo X. made it his chief policy to liberate Italy from all foreign dominion, and to unite all the Princes of Italy in a Confederation of independence.

Paul IV., though unsuccessful, was the champion of the independence of Italy against the Spaniards. From that time onwards the Pontiffs were ever in con- page 147 flict against Spain or France to save the liberties of Italy and of the Church. The histories of Pius VI. and Pius VII. are too well known to need recital.

It is therefore too late in the day to go about to persuade men that the Pontiffs were ever opposed to Italian unity, Italian freedom, Italian independence. These three things have been the aim and the work of the whole line of Popes, down to Pius IX. Even Mr. Gladstone acknowledges that Pius IX. is 'an Italian.'¹ Beyond all doubt there is not one in the long line I have quoted who has loved Italy more than he. There is not one who had at heart more ardently the unity, freedom, and independence of Italy. His first act was to set free every political prisoner with a full pardon. By that act he showed that he recognised the misdirected love of country in those who had been seduced into false or unlawful ways of seeking the unity and the liberties of their country.

In 1847 Pius IX. invited all the Princes of Italy to a League of Customs, by which the principle of Federal Unity would have been established. From this germ the National Unity would have steadily grown up, without shock or overthrow of right or justice. Once confederated, there was no identity of interests, no unity of power, which might not have grown solid and mature. This and the Supreme Council for the Government of the Pontifical State are proof enough

¹ Expostulation, p. 49.

page 148 of his desire for Italian unity, and of the far-reaching foresight with which he aimed at the elevation of Italy. And as for Italian independence, let the following letter, written by himself to the Emperor of Austria on the 2nd of May, 1848, suffice:—

'Your Imperial Majesty, this Holy See has been always wont to speak words of peace in the midst of the wars that stain the Christian world with blood; and in our Allocution of the 29th of last month, while we declared that our paternal heart shrunk from declaring war, we expressly declared our ardent desire to restore peace. Let it not be displeasing, therefore, to your Majesty that we turn to your piety and religion, and exhort you with a father's affection to withdraw your armies from a war which, while it cannot reconquer to the Empire the hearts of the Lombards and Venetians, draws after it the lamentable series of calamities that ever accompany warfare, and are assuredly abhorred and detested by you. Let it not be displeasing to the generous German people, that we invite them to lay aside all hatreds and to turn a domination which could not be either noble or happy while it rests only on the sword, into the useful relations of friendly neighbourhood. Thus we trust that the German nation, honourably proud of its own nationality, will not engage its honour in sanguinary attempts against the Italian nation, but will place it rather in nobly acknowledging it as a sister, as indeed both nations are our daughters, and most dear to our heart; thereby mutually withdrawing to dwell each one in its natural boundaries with honourable treaties and the benediction of the Lord. Meanwhile, we pray to the Giver of all lights and the Author of all good to inspire your Majesty with holy counsels, and give from our inmost heart to you and Her Majesty the page 149 Empress, and to the Imperial family, the Apostolic benediction.

'Given in Rome at Santa Maria Maggiore, on the third day of May, in the year 1848, the second of our Pontificate,

'Pius PP. IX.'

But the evil genius of revolution had begun to work. Across the field of the Christian and Catholic traditions of Italy, a chimerical theory of a Communistic State, a Republic without Christianity, a democracy without King or Pontiff, forced itself.

Mazzini had been crying for years, 'The Papacy is extinct, Catholicism is a corpse, and the Pope knows this. . . . . Read the Encyclical Letter.'² He had taught Young Italy the three degrees, of Guerilla Bands, Insurrection, Revolution.³ The mine was charged and the fuse already lighted. This widespread Secret Association covered the face of Italy. What followed all men know: the murder of Rossi, the siege of the Quirinal Palace, the wreck of all authority, the Socialist Revolution, the Roman Republic, impunity of sacrilege, and a reign of terror.

Now, let us suppose that in the period of our history, when the unity of the English people was gradually consolidating, some organised Apostleship of Socialism had begun to whisper in private and to preach in public such doctrines of conspiracy as these, and to teach that the people could never be free so long as King or Priest existed; that all monarchical power

¹ Times, March 28, 1847.

² Life and Writings of Mazzini, vol. i. p. 248.

³ Ibid. p. 108, and Appendix, 1864.

page 151 and ecclesiastical authority were enemies of the public weal; that the overthrow of the Monarchy and the extinction of the Church were the only remedies of present evils, the only means of future progress. Such a foreign element of discord, mistrust, conspiracy would have divided the hearts, intellects, and wills of the people of England, and rendered its unification impossible. The unity of religion in faith and worship, the unity of the Spiritual authority which spoke to the reason and the will of men, was then, as it is at this hour, the only principle of unity. Without this, legislation is merely mechanical; a dynamic power is wanted to bind men into one people. Our forefathers had it, and the English Monarchy of a thousand years is its fruit. The Italians have it at this hour in great vividness; but Philosophers and Doctrinaires, Conspirators and Communists, are perverting the intellect and dividing the wills of the rising men of Italy. If such a conspiracy had crossed our early unification, we should have been, it may be, at this day, I will not say a Heptarchy, but assuredly a divided people, with a paralyzed national will. May God save Italy from this danger. It is not too late. It was said in an eloquent speech, the other day, that a people which breaks with its past is doomed to division and to instability. The rupture of France with its ancient traditions in 1789 has generated the brood of political parties, which, from month to month, thwart page 152 and defeat each other's action, like palsied limbs. If Italy should break with its past; if it should forget the labours, and sufferings, and dangers which united its Pontiffs and its people in the wars of its independence, freedom, and unity; if it should forget the confederations wrought by the Pontiffs, by which they made all the divisions of Italy work together for the liberties of the whole Peninsula, from the Alps to its foot—then, indeed, I should despair of its future. It could have no other in store than a chronic warfare of parties, and the final sway of some successful soldier.

Of the population of 26,000,000 Italians not three millions have launched themselves in the revolution of the last twenty years. The great bulk of the people are, as they have always been, Christian, Catholic, and loyal. The Electoral body who have votes to return the Italian Parliament do not exceed in number some half million. Of these hardly one-half record their vote. The Italian Deputies are, therefore, chosen by one-hundreth part of the population. The whole Chamber is, therefore, revolutionary, and may be divided into two parties—the moderate revolution and the extreme revolution. The Catholic voters abstain from all participation in such a state. They are not revolutionists, either extreme or moderate. They could elect no deputy but one of their own principles; and no such deputy could sit, because to take his place he must bind page 153 himself by oath to the existing state of things, including, therefore, the violation of the sovereignty of the Pontiff. More than this, the existing state of the law has invaded the liberties and jurisdiction of the Church. It has abolished religious orders and institutions, it has harshly turned out their inmates upon a pittance, which, if paid, would not suffice for food. It has confiscated property, seized upon colleges, abolished theology from the universities, and the Christian doctrine from schools. And all this, be it remembered, not to meet the distracted state of a people who have lost their religious unity, and must be provided with civil marriage and secular education, but in the midst of a population absolutely and universally Catholic. This, and not what Mr. Gladstone, with a strange want of accuracy, supposes, is what the Syllabus condemns. It nowhere condemns the civil policy which is necessary for a people hopelessly divided in religion. For us this may be a necessity. In Italy it is a doctrine of the Doctrinaires. To force upon the united people of Italy that which is necessary for the divided people of England is a senseless legislation, and a mischievous breaking with the glorious past of Italy. I do not now stay to dwell upon the unpatriotic and un-Italian agitation of men who for twenty-five years have threatened Pius IX. with violence, and assailed him as the Vampire, the Canker, the Gangrene of Italy. Such men, from Aspromonte to this day, have been the chief hindrance page 154 to the unification and pacification of Italy. And those who in this country have encouraged and abetted those agitators—not that they knew anything but that Garibaldi was fighting against the Pope—have been among the worst friends of Italy; I might say among the unconscious but most mischievous enemies. It is strange how this one taint of bigotry will pervert everything. Garibaldi was raising insurrection in Sicily and Naples against a lawful sovereign; and those who put us now to question about our loyalty cheered and aided him by all moral influence. More than this, when the leader of rebellion came to England he was received with royal honours, and red carpets were spread for him at the threshold of aristocratic houses, until his name was found to be contagious. Then, in twenty-four hours he was sped from England with the profuse facilities of departure which wait upon an unwelcome guest. In my judgment—and I have formed it not in London from newspaper correspondents, but in Home during many a long residence, extending in all over seven years—those who have encouraged this chronic agitation against the religion of Italians and the independence of Rome, have been among the chief causes of the present disorders of Italy. They could put no surer bar to its unity or to the solution of the Roman question which they confidently believe to be settled. They are keeping it open by encouraging the Government of page 155 the day to persist in quarreling with the Catholic Church and with its Head. But this part of the subject has outgrown its proportion. I return, therefore, to the proposition I set out to prove,—that by the collisions which now exist between the Civil Powers and the Church, the Governments of Europe are destroying the main principle of their own stability. And I must add that they who are rekindling the old fires of religious discord in such an equal and tempered Commonwealth as ours, seem to me to be serving neither God nor their country.