These then were "for the Pope." Not because he had a divine right to be in Rome but because they individually and collectively flourished under his rule. They flourished because there was no hunger, because though there were unsanitary hovels there were no haunts of starving people who could obtain neither bread nor work—if any were in need of bread they threw a supplica into the Pope's carriage and he sent it to them when he got home. They flourished, because "where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise" and no wave of unrest, few of the ignobilities and none of the nobilities of a more strenuous life had passed over them. The papal government compared to a modern European government was like a blunderbuss in a modern arsenal, but though it was entirely ineffectual, though the people under its care merely lived out their lives with enough to eat and generation succeeded generation neither better nor worse than the men who went before them—it was an honest government in the financial sense. The people were not taxed, prices indeed were kept low as a means of humouring them, and the Pope's subjects were not exploited to fill his exchequer. In the strange medley of Roman ideas it seemed better to accomplish this end by the methods of the Jubilee year which exploited the soul of the foreigner. The papal government did not peculate, but the hated sbirri—the papal police—were often responsible for a missing bale of cloth or a burglary, and a child who had been left a fortune by her aunt only learnt when she was grown up that the curato of the Pantheon who had been made erede fiduciario (trustee) and executor of the testament had not thereby been constituted sole beneficiary. The administration in all departments was simpler than now, and the evils of the present bureaucracy were not known, but it was a government of privilege and patronage; "one under which a gentleman could live" said an Irishman, but the unprivileged person might find himself in prison for not kneeling when the Pope passed. A resident English sculptor who remembered the days of Gregory XVI. told me that Rome was the paradise of artists, who in their velvet jackets and squash felt hats did what seemed good in their own eyes, no man hindering them. The curious traveller of family and fortune—it was before the day of Cook's tourists—enjoyed every liberty under the hospitable papal government save only the liberty to speak or write about politics and religion, and suffered nothing save the occasional loss of a newspaper or book which the paternal government stopped at the frontier as likely to imperil the peace of mind of the Romans. They lived in a picturesque world, which recalled the middle ages at every step, where the prosaic dead level to which justice and civilisation had reduced the rest of Europe, did not penetrate, and they admired in Rome and for the Romans what they would have exposed in Parliament or the Times as intolerable abuses in their own country. From 1848 onwards political rigours unworthy of the Holy See were resorted to, though these were relaxed before 1870. Some art students who had prepared Bengal fireworks to celebrate the anniversary of the victory over the French at Porta San Pancrazio, were sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment. A similar sentence was passed on a "non-smoker" (not to smoke was a protest against the papacy at the expense of its tobacco trade) who came to words with a "smoker" and this barbarous sentence was enthusiastically upheld by such a journal as the Civiltà Cattolica. Commendatore Silvagni who cites these and similar instances in his Corte e Società romana writes indeed like a man too sore at what he has seen and too near to what he describes to present it in perspective, and he seems to the present writer a prejudiced guide to Rome before 1870. Sedition and conspiracy have met with scant ceremony at the hands of every nation and every prince in turn, and the way in which Pius IX. treated "the patriots" does not differ from that which may be read of in the history of any other country.

What was peculiar to the papal states was the confusion of the spiritual and the temporal; the special scandal came from the union of these two powers in one authority, the temporal being used to enforce the "spiritual" and the spiritual being abused to assist the temporal. The spectacle of priests, your "fathers in God," your spiritual directors, ordering the public floggings, nay the public torture, of men and women could hardly edify or civilise; Gregory XVI. had abolished these public castigations which used to be suffered in the Campo de' fiori (under an archway which may still be seen), but Antonelli strove to revive them in the Piazza del Popolo in 1856. Other mediæval barbarisms ceased the day the Italians entered Rome, among them the Ghetto.

The people as we see were not taxed, but neither were they taught. Some subjects were altogether taboo—modern history was among them. Obscurantism reigned supreme. Girls were taught to read in order that they might read their prayers, but they did not learn to write lest they should indite love letters. This was typical of the papal system. You took away the light lest the child should ever happen to burn itself, and you pursued the same policy with the adult. No instruction was vouchsafed, no information given, no education whatever of the intellectual or moral man. Girls were often destined from birth to the nunnery, and the veil was the never-failing remedy against a marriage distasteful to the parents or even the brothers, grand-parents, or uncles of the victim. No one denies that this compulsory enclosure was commonly practised in Rome. "Are you not ashamed to be reading, go and knit stockings" shouted a Jesuit to a poor lady who sat reading in her carriage in the Corso as the worthy father, who had been preaching a retreat to women, crossed the street. Many of the poor ladies in convents became imbecile so void were their minds, so vacuous their lives, and in our own day a Roman community of thirty nuns required the services of no fewer than thirty-one confessors. The education received by the boys of good families sent them home with the airs and gestures of so many little abbés. The children's games were tarred with the same brush, the same universal insipidity. The little boys dressed up as priests and said sham masses or moved about pieces of white cardboard which represented the host; explaining to their little sisters that such solemn fooling was not for "wicked girls." Occasionally, the natural talent, the natural wit and moral courage of a girl might provide her with a rôle and allow her to dominate instead of being the sport of circumstances. But the young men as a rule fell victims to that weak-kneedness which makes them the prey of the fear of derision in their school-days, intensified by a training which made self-dependence and self-development impossible. Thus one of the Doria, a family which had given heroes to its country, the younger brother of that Doria whose English wife's name Mary is cut in a box hedge in the Villa Pamfili, broke the heart of the noble Vittoria Savorelli because his uncle, of whom he was independent, objected to their engagement. A Roman marchese having been struck in the face by another Roman in the middle of the Corso at midday rushed off to consult his confessor as to what steps he should take, and we are not surprised to learn that he was able to follow the advice proffered, and "bear it patiently." There is a story of a frate who could have taught him differently. As he was crossing a bridge a man struck him on the cheek; the good frate immediately turned the other, then he picked up his man and pitched him into the river; for, as he explained, the Gospel bid him turn the other cheek to the smiter, but it did not tell him what he was to do afterwards.

The fierce light of publicity has transformed the lives of the Roman clergy and religious since 1870. Those Roman priests who live without reproach themselves, confess that "the revolution" has brought about this signal benefit. The Accademia dei Nobili Ecclesiastici which received impoverished nobles, ordained them, and sent them at twenty-five years old to rule as prefects over the papal provinces was the fertile nursing-ground of a corrupt prelacy. The proud and affectionate interest with which the Romans, despite many lapses, regarded the popes, was not extended to the great papal officers who from the Governatore di Roma downwards did not cease to provide a scandalous example to the people until the moment when "the Italians" entered the city.

It will be said: these people at least were taught their religion? They were taught their religion as they were taught everything else—that is, not at all. They knew that you must obey the pope and obey the priest, that you would be damned if you did not go to confession and hear mass. But they thought one Madonna would hear their petitions better than another ("Non andate da quella, non vale niente" "don't go to that one, she is no good") and that exorcism was a surer remedy for a plague of bugs than cleanliness. They never heard a single verse of the Gospel explained to them, and young men of the higher bourgeoisie learnt their religion if they learnt it at all, after 1870, when they were grown up and thought and read for themselves. Such men, many of whom belong to the Circolo San Pietro, are to-day the mainstay of intelligent and faithful religion in the city. Before 1870 there was in Rome a real ignorance of the doctrines, the beauties, and the duties, of Christianity. The one moment chosen for a great religious impression was of course the first Communion. Boys and girls were then enclosed and eight days were spent in pious exercises and instruction. The sons of the poor went to the Cappellette di San Luigi at Ponte Rotto, the well to do to the same institution near Santa Maria Maggiore. On the other side of the basilica the girls of well to do families were prepared at the Bambin Gesù, the poor at San Pasquale. I am assured that at Ponte Rotto the effect of these eight days shut up in a religious house frequently changed the lives of boys with vicious tendencies. In other classes the appeal to unreal emotions was not always so successful, and the girls at the Bambin Gesù, dressed up in the stiff unaccustomed habit of the religious, often communicated with the one dread filling their minds that they might inadvertently commit "the sin" of touching the host with their teeth. Not less mistaken was the custom of the "Six Sundays," the girls and boys alike for the next six weeks communicating "in honour of the chastity of S. Lewis Gonzaga." And then buon viaggio, as the Italians say; they probably never communicated again except as "paschal lambs" at Easter. They communicated then of course. At the rails, the moment they had received the host, a ticket was handed to them with the name of the parish and some pious Latin verse inscribed on it. To this the communicant appended his name and address, and no succour was given, no "grazia" accorded except to those provided with this ticket. The names of those who had not communicated were posted at the church doors. Thus not only did all who could in conscience do so communicate once a year, but those who could not and would not procured the services of some woman who made it her business to communicate every day, or several times a day, during Easter tide, selling the tickets thus received for a franc or two francs each.

Here was one of the inevitable degradations of a theocracy. Another was this—people found working at their trade, in their back shop, in their private room, on festas were arrested and imprisoned sometimes for several days. Respectable citizens who found themselves compelled to finish a piece of work, behind closed doors, in this way, were subjected to the ignominious and futile punishment, which was certainly not calculated to educate their own religious sense or that of their families and children. Spies, under such a government, were always easy to find, and this and similar laws gave fine scope to the purveyors of private revenge. You could not ostentatiously abstain from going to mass, if you were poor you could not abstain at all, for the Roman parish priests were so many civil magistrates with definite powers, and if the answers to their numerous questions were not satisfactory it was the worse for the householder and his prospects. One means of finding out people's private affairs was through the servants who acted as spies reporting everything to the parocco. Pinelli the famous designer and engraver, whose bust to-day adorns the Pincio, who had never been pious or even respectable, repaid the old woman who reported his habitual absence from mass by ringing up the neighbourhood between half past four and five every morning, and in reply to the usual "Chi è?" calling out "è Pinelli che va a messa"; nor did he desist ringing at his enemy's door till she got out of bed to hear his announcement. The carabineers of the theocracy also had a mixed service. A room had to be set apart for the temerarious folk who required meat on a Friday or a fast day, and the carabineers entered the restaurants and eating houses, sequestrating the dish which smoked before the customer if this regulation was not observed. Moreover, at the head of every department was a cardinal; the Roman wife of a political exile once described to me what a via crucis it was for a young woman to run the gauntlet of these clerical departments if she had to ask some favour for the exiled husband.

But if they were unlettered and superstitious were the people in those days better than now? The comparisons we sometimes hear urged are not really fair for two reasons. There is to be found in Rome to-day among the lower and the half educated classes all that want of moral equilibrium which a revolution of ideas brings with it. Moral Italy has yet to be made, as the moral unity of Italy is also as yet only in the making. Before 1870, on the other hand, those who were faithful to the standard then put before them, were faithful to what was never better than a poor and low ideal of conduct, sentiment, and religious duty. The papal standard required no refinement of feeling, no education of the conscience: no one was scandalised that a shop should display the barbarous notice "Qui si castrono per la cappella papale," or that the popular story ran that when Guido Reni was painting his picture of the Crucifixion before a living model attached to a cross, he killed him at the last moment in his frenzy to see and seize the death struggle, and fled the city; but that the holy father had absolved him because, as you who go may see, it is a capo d'opera. And the poor man killed to make a fine picture of Him who endured death to teach us pity for each other? Ebbene, poveretto.... The pope is like Nemesis, like the blind forces of nature, like an avalanche, a falling mountain, or an earthquake—not a moral force, but a weight of authority. As you can see for yourself if you go to San Lorenzo in Lucina the work is a capo d'opera and the pope knows better than you. Moral judgment is silent before the weight of authority.

My narrator, who only wished to magnify a great picture, not to raise a moral problem, always carried with him a paper blest by the pope, and of extraordinary efficacy, that is it was Spanish and was covered with writing, every corner had something pious in it, and no one who carried it could die unabsolved. The proof was set forth in the blest paper itself, for one man did die unabsolved, they cut off his head in fact; but the head was not to be brow-beaten, it simply went off to the nearest town—and in these cases, as the witty Marquise du Deffand said to Gibbon, Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte—and found a priest (what priest ever shows himself the least dérouté in such circumstances?) who at once confessed the head, and there the matter ended.

Rome before 1870 was not even externally what we see it now. An old world city of tall palaces, the windows in the lower story grated, of monasteries and churches, of ruins in unconscious beauty, of fountains of waters, of cabbage gardens and orti, of orange and lemon gardens which at every turn surprised and delighted the eye. The main streets straight as Roman roads, the piazzas, in contrast to these, full of sun, intolerable from May onwards at noonday. A city of narrow squalid streets huddled together, in which the domesticities are carried on unrebuked and unabashed—in the poorer quarters every third house appeared to be a washerwoman's, the linen hung across the road on lines stretched from window to window. And everywhere an unpromising door, an open gate, may reveal a little picture, a cool garden and fountain, orange and lemon trees, a bend of the river, a view of the Janiculum or the Aventine. A Roman smell pervading everything and sufficiently characteristic to make you sure, if you were suddenly set down in any part of the town, that you were in Rome: and at night another smell, the smell of the ages, unwholesome, penetrating, coming up from the soil, or the freshly turned earth, and making one shut the windows hastily on the loveliest of moonlit evenings. A wealth of street cries, varying with the season, and the nocturnal serenades, assist that atmosphere of noise for noise' sake and movement which are essential to the Italian, the noise of the shabby two-horsed carriages grinding along on the paved streets and driven by the bad Roman drivers with a continual cracking of the whip and a constant application of the squeaking break, of wine carts lazily winding their way across the streets of the eternal city with that sense of infinite time and space born of long colloquies with the sun by day and the moon by night across a deserted campagna, a score of little brazen bells, perhaps, clanging and jingling at the driver's ear—the constant noise by day and night of a life-loving, loquacious, complaining, gesticulating, rebellious and keenly observant people. A city of priests and dependents of priests, here there are no industries, no great machines are set in motion every day, no factories open with daylight to give employment to hundreds of skilled workmen. Every one who is not a priest works for priests or for the monasteries. The little workshops may be seen in the Borgo of S. Peter's, in Campo Marzo, in the arches of the theatre of Marcellus—every little doorway contains a cobbler, the piazze which lead to the big churches are crowded on festas with vendors of religious pictures and rosaries. The convents of women make their own habits, but there is a great industry for providing the thousands of priests, the seminarists, canons, monsignori, cardinals and cardinals' retainers, and Vatican functionaries with cassocks, robes, uniforms, hats, berrettas, stocks and pumps. In the centre of this life, which is ecclesiastical even for the layman, it seems right that when we notice a stir and turn round with the rest, we should see the papal cortège and the Pope round whom all this life revolves; the centre of this city of churches and cassocks, because he is the centre of a far larger world. For Rome is what it is because its sovereign bishop is the cynosure for the eyes of that Christendom which counts the largest number of adherents on the face of the globe, and their Mecca is his city, Rome.

Let us follow a pedestrian who is starting on his afternoon walk, one bright day in April, from the neighbourhood of Santa Maria dell' Orto on the other side of the Tiber, and see Rome before 1870 with his eyes. Like all good Italians he is curious, and he crosses the street when he sees a man with a large oblong box covered with some black waterproof stuff ring at what is apparently a convent door—and the meanest door in Rome may give access to the scene of busiest monastic life. The door is opened by the convent porteress, and when the lid is removed our friend sees the ostie, the hosts for the use of the convent, which are brought round every week or every fortnight to the monasteries and churches, a hundred here, twenty there, according to the need. As he passes the convent of Santa Maria in Capella he gets a glimpse of the beautiful cool cloister garden with its lemon trees and sees the cornette of the "Daughter of France" whose application for permission to remain and work on French soil was immediately granted at a time when so many companies of priests monks and friars applied in vain. While crossing the river by the island of the Tiber, he meets a procession from the church hard by with its Franciscan friars who walk next after the confraternity of the quarter in their well-known red "sacks" or gowns; the priest in his short surplice and stole is followed by the men bearing the bier, all carry lighted torches and chant the Miserere or the Gradual psalms. Leaving the Ghetto well to the left he takes the street which passes the famous Roman house of the Oblates of Tor de' Specchi, and crosses in front of the Capitol and the steps of Ara Coeli. He meets many priests, monks, and friars, but the numerous suore to be seen in the modern city are conspicuous by their absence. The nuns, of course, are never seen, the Oblates occasionally drive in large closed landaus like those in which the cardinals progress to-day; but new communities of women find it difficult to obtain authorisation, and a constant supervision, no longer feasible, checks the mushroom growth of "active" congregations. Just beyond he hears a bell and guesses, rightly enough, that the Viaticum is being brought from the neighbouring parish church of San Marco to some sick or dying parishioner—in a moment he sees the little familiar procession, the acolytes with incense and bell, the priest carrying the host enveloped in the humeral veil under the ombrellino, the women and men who were in or near the church at the time following with lighted candles, and stopping beneath the windows of the sick man while his Lord visits him—if it were wet a little dark knot of people under umbrellas would be waiting, and would accompany the host with candle and umbrella just the same. Is it for the same sick person, he wonders, that the gala carriage of Duca Torlonia next passes him carrying the Bambin Gesù, the little wooden painted doll from Ara Coeli. If the person whom it visits is to live the Bambino will turn red, if he is to die he will turn pale. Our pedestrian crosses the Forum of Trajan and as he mounts the steps he encounters a man of the people who tells him as he hurries breathless along that he is going to fetch Monsignor B., one of the episcopal canons of Santa Maria Maggiore, to cresimare his baby, three weeks old, who is dying. He and the mother are bent on their baby going to paradise with all the glory of the added sacrament. A baby of three weeks old "confirmed" will sound strange in English ears. It must be borne in mind therefore that the rite of confirmation in the English Church is a new rite unlike that in use in any ancient Christian Communion. In the Roman Church the rite of chrism is the ancient sacramental rite complementary to baptism, which always included the imposition by the bishop of the sign of the cross on the forehead of the newly baptized, "for a type of the spiritual baptism." As such it is not properly a separate ceremony at all from the baptism with water. Our friend turns to the left and as he reaches the piazza before the Quirinal palace he sees the papal cortège approach. The Pope (it is Pius IX.) is coming—not in his state carriage with the gilt angels, which we may still see at the papal stables on the way to the Vatican museum of sculpture or the papal garden—but in the carriage he uses every day. Every one kneels, and a mother who holds up her baby for the apostolic blessing secretly "makes the horns" with her free hand, for Pius IX. is reputed to have the evil eye and to cast the jettatura.

But it is drawing towards the Ave Maria, the sunset hour, and it is rather free and easy even in a monsignore's servant to be abroad after that late hour. We will therefore leave our pedestrian in the Via del Quirinale, first noticing with him a group of seminarists on their way to pay their evening visit at the church of the Santi Apostoli; they raise their hats as they pass the door of the Sacramentate, opposite the palace, where the host is constantly exposed, and then hurry on to see the Pope and receive his paternal blessing. We, however, will turn down at the Four Fountains, and follow a priest who mounts a narrow staircase to the apartment occupied by a canon of the basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere in an old granary of Palazzo Barberini, which has been converted into dwellings for faithful retainers of the princely house. It contains all that is necessary for his wants—a chapel where he says his daily mass, the kitchen regions and some slips of rooms where his food is prepared and eaten in company with the two orphan relatives who, at his invitation, arrived at his door hand in hand one winter's evening many years ago, two little girls of ten and fifteen, who had come alone all the way from a northern town.

They communicate at his daily mass, but their generous guardian, who sees to their moral training, carefully hides away his copy of the Scriptures as a perilous work for two young souls. The sisters enjoy an incredible distinction among their commari and compari—their neighbours and gossips—for in the canon's chapel there is a corpo di santo sano. Besides the chapel he has a bedroom and sitting-room, communicating—they are decorated with full length Magdalenes grasping skulls in evident deprecation of their want of apparel, of crucifixes painted on canvas, and of pictorial compositions consisting of a crucifix hung with a rosary, flanked by a couple of guttering church candles and enlivened with a book, a death's head, or an hour glass. These are his own handiwork, and no intimacy with the works of art in the eternal city enlighten him as to their relative merits. The priest enters the sitting-room first, and finds six or seven men, all priests, on their knees, in the various corners of the room. Presently the door beyond opens, and a priest comes in and kneels down by a vacant chair. Another rises enters the bedroom and shuts the door carefully behind him. Our canon is a favourite confessor among his brother clergy, and it is the general custom for priests to be confessed at the houses of the religious or secular clergy they select as confessors, the rule about the use of the public confessionals in the churches applying especially to the confessions of women. The men kneeling in the first room are preparing for their weekly confession or making their thanksgiving after it.

When the poor canon died, leaving his orphan kinswomen unprovided for, the corpo di santo sano, which might have fetched something, was taken away at once because it was against ecclesiastical rules for them to keep it, but the pictures, which could fetch nothing, continued to gaze on the struggles of the little sisters, reminding them of the poor canon and also of the fickleness of the public taste in articles de virtu—for during his lifetime these pictures had received their full meed of respectful admiration.

As our pedestrian enters his own house door, which is covered with immagini and texts serving as charms—among which S. Anna the mother of the Madonna is not absent as a house-patron, and the faded rose brought from the festa of the Divin Amore figures conspicuously—he may indeed have a vague sense that the annus Domini will soon be too strong for the life he has just been witnessing, but he will hardly be disturbed by any speculation as to the elements which have conspired to form the atmosphere surrounding the first Bishop of Christendom in this his capital once the capital of the world. He will not think of the apotheosis of the emperor in ancient Rome, of the orientalism which crept into Western Christendom through Byzantium, imposing things which especially here in Rome were alien to its religious genius; he will scarcely remember that the Pope's temporal sovereignty added a diadem to his tiara, for he has never distinguished the temporal from the spiritual arm, or discerned the part which the former has played in determining the manifestations of the latter.

CHAPTER XII

It is certainly not generally remembered that ideals for a great future for Italy were not confined in the "forties" to the Italian unità men. Pius IX. had read Cesare Balbo's "Speranze d'Italia" and had understood that it was desirable that Italy should free herself from the stranger. But he had been most strongly moved by Gioberti's "Primato morale e civile degli Italiani" in which "the majesty of Christianity and the destinies of Italy" were set forth as mutually interdependent, Italy gaining its pre-eminence from the Christian primacy which had grown in its midst and was of its soil. There he read that "Italy is the capital of Europe because Rome is the religious metropolis of the world," and there he gained his notion of an Italian federation under the civil headship of the Pope. That this idea was unrealisable was not the fault of Pius IX. It was the fault of the age in which he lived. He was not by temperament an obscurantist, and he began by being something of a political idealist. He had been brought up piously and carefully, and had no political arts, and he wondered that the papal government should be found opposing reforms which were demanded by modern progress. Yet his own papal career ended in political obscurantism and the absurdities of the Syllabus. Even had the flight to Gaeta, however, never intervened to chill the Pope's political idealism, things could not have had a different ending; for if on the one hand no European nation would have consented to place itself, even nominally, under a theocratic suzerain, on the other hand the papacy was not in the "forties" and had not been for centuries in a position to accept the civil headship of a great European state. Gioberti himself said enough to show that his golden visions for Catholicism were contingent on a complete restoration of the Church which was not undertaken then and has not been undertaken since.

Now that Rome is lost to the popes it is the fashion to conceive of the temporal power as a divinely ordained instrument for the protection and free development of the Kingdom of God on earth—self-consistent, identical, uninterrupted. Such a conception does not correspond to facts. We all know that the "Donation" of Rome to the popes in the fourth century by the first Christian Emperor Constantine, is only a pious myth, but even Charlemagne in the eighth retained his imperial rights over Rome and over the person of the pontiff. It was not till the age of the renascence and the rise of the great European states with the absorption of the small principalities and duchies, that the temporal power of the popes was ideated by them in its modern sense; and it is then that they completed the territorial aggressions by which they carved out for themselves an Italian state extending north and east to Tuscany and Venetia and southwards to Naples. The history of the papacy since then has been a history not of war between the forces of the world and the forces of Satan, the efforts of princes to enslave and the efforts of popes to establish Christian freedom, but a history of the efforts of the civil power and the civil prince to curb papal encroachments on their rights—efforts which during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries attained the proportions of true Magna Chartas of civil liberties. The modern conception of the temporal power aggravated the "pre-eminent domain" which the popes claimed in temporal affairs; the conception of civil liberties which had smouldered in the middle ages burst into flame in the modern world, and less than a century in fact elapsed between the final destruction of all "home rule" in the papal states and the loss of the temporal power.

When we speak of the servitude of the Pope in the King of Italy's dominions, we forget that Catholic princes have always found themselves obliged to restrain the papal arm, and to propound from time to time laws protecting the minor against the major clergy, the prelates against the pretensions of the papacy, the people against the publication of obnoxious Bulls, and the public peace by subjecting the correspondence between the Pope and the bishops to scrutiny. Thus the disciplinary canons of the Council of Trent were not published—and were never accepted—in many Catholic states. Canon law has been the constant butt of civil legislation which has denied one by one the immunities of ecclesiastics and abolished the existence of ecclesiastical courts for the trial of clerical offenders. The abstract question of the popes' relation to civil rights and to temporal power cannot be viewed apart from the sober teaching of history.

Already in the reign of Pius VI. the Romans had imbibed from the French some of the doctrines of the Revolution, among them that of the sovereignty of the people. From that time onwards the papal power could never have been upheld except by foreign arms; and the spirit in which the great Napoleon offered his services should be sufficient evidence that the task of preserving the patrimony of Peter was not undertaken by those whom we ought to regard as having understood better than the Italians the things which belonged to Catholic peace. Every one will admit that the pontifical states were not really independent during these foreign occupations: what appears to be less clear is that a pope-king is not necessarily more free to exercise his high office than a pope who does not rule or who may even be the subject of another government. There is a covered way from the Vatican to Castel Sant' Angelo which is itself a parable of the history of the Roman popes. It was constructed as a means of fleeing in secrecy and safety from the Vatican when the turbulent Romans or foreign invaders made the pope's life insecure and placed his city at the mercy of vandals. The "Pope's own city of Rome" should never be thought of without a mental picture of the covered passage from the episcopal palace to the fortified castle, along which popes young and old, bad and good, have hurried praying or cursing. Let us look upon some of these fugitive popes, and realise from their trembling steps, their impotent objurgations, the hunted look in their eyes, how much of dignity and liberty the possession of Rome secured to them in the exercise of their divine mission. There is a type of Catholic whose favourite theme is Canossa, as his adversary's favourite theme is the Copernican system. An emperor standing outside the Pope's castle in a penitent's shirt through weary days and icy nights beseeching him to withdraw the decree of excommunication strikes the imagination to the exclusion of the sequel of the story. Four years after the experience of Canossa, the "penitent" emperor, accompanied by his antipope, brought an army to Rome and made Gregory fly to Castel Sant' Angelo. The people abandoned the cause of the great Hildebrand, betrayed Rome to the enemy at its gates and deposed their lawful pope. But imperial vengeance for a humiliation which had been undertaken to satisfy the superstition of the vulgar did not end there. Henry V. exacted from Paschal II. a further penalty, and while Europe looked on in apathy, the Pope and his cardinals were made prisoners and a number of priests were drawn through the mud at the horses' tails as the imperial troops rode off. Gelasius II. was seized in the conclave which elected him, trampled underfoot and chained in a tower belonging to the Frangipani. Rescued by the Romans of Trastevere and the Island, he is next found hiding in the Borgo from the emperor, who pursued him in his flight to Gaeta, annulled his election and proclaimed an antipope. On the Pope's return to Rome he was entrapped at a mass in S. Prassede, but escaping to the meadows by S. Paul's where he was found weeping with the women of the neighbourhood, he died an exile in a Cluniac convent in France.

In 1144 the Romans determined to restore their free Senate and demanded, under Arnold of Brescia's influence, the abolition of the temporal power. Lucius II. stormed the Capitol and died defending his rights, but his successor was forced to fly the eternal city. Our one English Pope, who possessed the fine old English sounding name of Nicholas Breakspear, declared on his death bed that the Pope of Rome must find means to content the sordid soul of the Roman people or quit his throne and his city a fugitive. Indeed nothing is more noticeable than the strict impartiality with which the Romans meted out violence to popes good and bad; and exactly a century before they were deposing the great Hildebrand, they could have been seen outraging the body of the infamous Boniface VII., surnamed "Francone," whose bleeding corpse was kicked and rolled down the streets of Rome to the foot of the statue of the good Marcus Aurelius. In the same century which saw the English Hadrian IV. reigning in Rome, two German archbishops led troops against a pope. The Romans, as usual, required the vanquished pope to abdicate, and accepted Barbarossa as their ruler, who gave them an antipope. Of one emperor at this time it could be truthfully said that he had "the whole College of Cardinals in his pay" which affords some notion of the spiritual dignity of conclaves, while the ups and downs to which the papal rulers of Rome were subject is illustrated in the case of Pope Alexander who in the same twelfth century was received with open arms after ten years' exile by the fickle people, who however duly stoned his coffin when he died. Clement III., himself a Roman, was obliged to sanction once more the powers of the Roman Senate, and to hand over to the people part of the tolls. Innocent IV. fled to Genoa, this time from fear of the emperor, who afterwards kept him a prisoner in his own Lateran palace. Even a Boniface VIII. narrowly escaped being kidnapped by the French King and died most miserably in the Vatican. Benedict XI., the saintly Venetian pope, attempted to punish the perpetrators of this outrage, but had to withdraw his Bulls, and retire himself to Perugia. The election of his successor the French Pope Clement V. was followed by the exile of the popes in Avignon, and since their return to Rome in 1377 the popes have not belied their character for alternately inspiring and flying from violence foreign and internecine.

That mute but eloquent parable in stone is the real synthesis of the history of the papacy—the episcopal palace by the tomb of the Apostle, in the first Christian church, at one end, and at the other the fortress which was once a pagan emperor's mausoleum, with its dungeons and its history, secret and open, of crime and bloodshed; and between these the covered way along which the popes pass and repass from one to the other, symbol not of the separation but of the fateful conjunction of spiritual and temporal which has haunted their history.

It would, indeed, be strange if ages of barbarism could have secured to the first Christian bishop the honour and safety which can now be assured to him by that civilisation and tolerance which we have substituted for "the ages of faith"; and United Italy must have a long future ahead of it before it can have heaped on the popes one hundredth part of the indignities and sufferings which they underwent when nominally masters of Rome. But such modern conditions have not always prevailed, and those who in all ages have waged war against the theory of the temporal power—saints and philosophers—ought to have recognised that at one period of European history territorial lordship, feudal rank and power, were a necessity. The Church did not create and did not choose the feudal system, which was indeed opposed in principle to the spirit and teaching of Christ's Gospel, and the days have long since gone by when "secular grandeur guaranteed to the Church her religious integrity"—nevertheless these days once existed, and then the Catholic Church was as a strong man armed cap à pie fighting for life, and leaving to the individual—the saintly bishop, the saintly clerk or layman—the task of softening the rigours and planing the roughnesses of a Christian system which was also at war with itself. Although it is true that no form of the popes' temporal sway has at any time secured to the papacy the benefits that have been alleged for it by ultramontane writers since 1870, and conversely true that the events of 1870 did not deprive the pope of those benefits, yet it is also perfectly true that the papacy has been, through the centuries, the means of preserving for Italy its ancient character of a world power, and of preserving for Rome, abandoned by Constantine and his successors to the fate of a small provincial town, cowering in its own ruins and filth, the prestige and significance of the city which ruled the world. It is the successors of Peter who have perpetuated the meaning of its title "the Eternal City," and have carried on, through fine weather and foul, the immortality of Augustus. This surely constitutes the papacy's chief claim on Italy's consideration.

There is, moreover, a curious and subtile, but perfectly comprehensible, tie between Italy and the popes, to which expression was given by the priest-philosopher Gioberti in his book on "The Primacy" already quoted. The Italian who never goes to church, nay the Italian who believes in no Church—and in Italy he is not at all necessarily the same person—contemplates the papal primacy with pleasure and pride, and considers with approval the phenomenon which brings the rest of Europe to kiss the foot of an Italian. He is perfectly aware, on the one side, that the Christian primacy—which is an Italian primacy—adds lustre and a cosmopolitan atmosphere to the city and the land which was the cradle of modern civilisation; and in some undefinable, yet I think definite, way he sees in it a compensation for the glory which has departed from his land of glories, a tangible pledge and earnest of that world-mastery whose sceptre is now wrenched from his hands.