advantageously prosecuted at Rome, may spend months or years in the city at his favourite study, or within his favourite circle, in total ignorance either of the repressive character of its government, or of the superstitious practices of its Church. He may bury himself in one of its many circles of art or of archæology; he may burrow in the catacombs, or sit musing like Gibbon on the stairs of the Ara Coeli, or under the arches of the Colosseum, or weave his mystic poetic lines like Shelley half projected in air, from some jutting stone in the topmost pile of the giant ruins of the Thermae of Caracalla; or some sculptured aisle or storied column may find him day after day reading off the tale of its bassirelievi, or some treasured manuscript of the Vatican, with its artistic illuminations, chain him worshipfully to its study, neither knowing nor seeking to know anything beyond his favourite pursuit. There are no common citizen interests or duties to bring even Romans together. Their society is thrown into classes, and each defiles off into its own favourite café, to discuss its favourite subject, in dealing exclusively with which it may enjoy a liberty happily undistracted by the knowledge of the existence of a government at all.

A British artist or scholar may even feel, in his entire escape for a season from all questions of politics and religion, as if he had gained by his residence in Rome a position of greater breadth and freedom. If an Englishman, he is delivered from all wranglings on high, broad, and low church, or of church and dissent, with which the English air is rife ; or if a Scotchman, from what he may have reckoned the no less weary questions of Scottish presbyterian subdivisions; and in the enjoyment of this repose he may feel as if he had come under the wing of a comprehensive catholicity that had found a happy solution for them all, and brought their conflict of opinions, with their harsh sectarian irritating judgments, to an end. Permitted as a stranger to worship as he pleases, he enjoys his liberty without its accompanying home friction, and the ceaseless summons to the war to vindicate it or convert it into an aggressive power. What pity that the catholicity in which he rejoices is but the compelled catholicity of an overwhelming repressive force that annihilates all liberty, and constitutes the assertion of individual convictions a crime!

But we must come to the great feature of Rome. Everything passes into the shade before its dominant ecclesiasticism, as all its smaller churches and minor cupolas disappear before the great swelling dome of St Peter's. No man needs to be told, when he has entered within any of the gates of Rome, that he is in the Mecca of Romanism, that he is in the

Priests and Soldiers.

867

city of its Grand Llama. In our English and Scottish cities, the priesthood has disappeared as a distinctive prominent class. Ministers are merged in the mass of their fellow-citizens, and influence them only as entitled to exercise influence by their worth and talents; their priestly as distinct from their personal Christian influence, has happily long since set. But the feature of Rome is its priests and priestlings. The priest stands on every step of the ladder, from the throne downwards, fills every position, and is everywhere to be seen, either in the long black robe, broad brim of the secular, or in the brown-hooded mantle and sandals of the Capuchin, or in the white flannel gown and cape of the Dominican, or in some one or other of the many colours, black, white, or grey, that are the symbols of the host of the regulars. You cannot look into a diligence but some priest looks out upon you; or turn the corner of a street without the danger of running foul of one; or glance along its line without eying a procession of some order; or proceed along your way without being swept past by some one of the more dignified class in charioted state, or walking in scarlet and purple conversing with some humbler brother, and followed at a respectful distance by a body guard of one or two servants in livery; or enter a church where a festa is celebrating, without running the risk of stumbling over their prostrate lines, or of being pressed more closely than you could wish amidst their compact groups.

There is but one class that competes with the priests in number; and it were hard to tell which of them gives its most decided tint to the drapery of the streets. If you miss a priest on the Roman streets, your eye is sure to alight on a soldier; if you miss a procession with candle and crucifix, you are sure to meet a detachment with drum and bugle. The black and red wonderfully interlace each other on the Roman highways, and seem duly balanced. Is it the predominance of the black that has made so large a foreground of red necessary to the harmony of the Roman picture? The fact is an outstanding one at this moment for the instruction of Europe, that the city that has the largest number of priests, for its population, in the world, requires for the preservation of its peace the largest number of soldiers!

It is extremely difficult to get at the exact number of priests residing at Rome. Statistics is not a favourite science in the eternal city; and no blue books are published, as we have said, for the edification of the curious. A reliable authority named to us, as an approach to the correct number of priests resident in Rome during the winter months one to every fifteen of the population. If we can trust

the tables published this year by the Jesuits, they return the entire number of their order throughout the globe at 7728. Of that number, 385 are stationed in Rome. But in addition to their great institution in the city, the seat of their general, and the fountainhead of their government, they have establishments occupying in every direction the country around Rome, at Comarca Velletri, Frosinone, and Viterbo, establishments which sustain and strengthen the influence which their order wields in the capital. The repute in which the order is held in Rome amongst its citizens may be gathered from a current apologue, coined by some of the wits of the city, to account for the wind that so freely blows as you turn the corner to the church of the Jesu. As a general feature of the climate of Rome, the air is still, but as the apologue goes, the wind and the devil having agreed one day to take their walk together, stopped at the Jesu, the devil having business to do within. The wind promised to remain till his companion should come out, and there he continues waiting till this hour, breezing and blowing on all passers, the business of the devil with the Jesuits not yet being finished.

It is this dominant ecclesiasticism that necessitates the intolerable repressiveness of the Roman government. The government of a priest-king, if wielded by less than a divine head, cannot but be an unendurable tyranny. Pio Nono tried to be a liberal priest-king. He was willing, without sacrificing either his pontifical or his regal rights, to have allowed a check in counteraction of their tendency to a tyranny. He tried the check of the lay element in the government of Rome, but he fled before it, and his fears have ever since counselled, and Antonelli with them, that if he is to reign at all, he and his priests must reign alone. And he is right; the theoretic claims of Rome's royalpriestly government constitute it essentially a despotism. Its dictum is law by divine right, and he who disobeys its mitred head is guilty of the double crime of treason and blasphemy. In imagination, the infallibility claimed for the papacy as a spiritual power is separable from the sovereignty claimed by it as a temporal one. But in a government of priests, who is to make the separation, or hinder the infallibility being perverted into a crushing State weapon, the sanction and plea for every exercise of lawless sovereign

will?

Guizot, in his conservative dread of the Italian revolution, has gone so far as to conceive to himself the papacy, even whilst retaining its dogma of infallibility, so thoroughly reformed, as frankly to acknowledge the principles of reli

Guizot's Vision of the Papacy of the future. 869

gious toleration, and freely to administer its temporal sovereignty on the recognised principles of civil liberty. The picture is a novel one, which he draws in the following passages of his work on " The Christian Church and Society in 1861." We doubt whether a statesman so profoundly read in the history of Europe ever thought of his words as more than a fancy sketch.

"I sometimes," says Guizot, "picture to myself what might happen if one day the supreme power of the Catholic Church, the papacy, should accept fully and openly the principles of religious liberty. Not that of mental indifference, but of the incompatibility and absolute illegality of force in matters of faith. This principle does not touch any of the important bases of catholicism, neither the unity nor spiritual infallibility of the church and its head, nor any dogma essentially religious. It consists solely in recognising the separation of civil and religious life, the authority of mind. alone over mind, and the right of human conscience not to be governed in its relations with God by human decrees and punishments. We cannot estimate by anticipation the effect which the frank and firm introduction of this principle into the Catholic Church might produce in the civilized world. By the strong organization, by the splendour of its worship, by many of its institutions and maxims, that church responds to powerful instincts of human nature. If it would seriously renounce, without reserve or theological subtilty, all alliance with absolute temporal power, all hostility against civil liberty, all appeal to physical constraint in spiritual orders, it would receive much strength; for without ceasing to be religious itself, it would return to social harmony with the present and the future." Again, in the same strain of ima ginary political combinations, this really great statesman and writer, led away by his fears of the rising Italian kingdom, and its unification of Italy, asks, "What would have happened if a great pope-a Gregory VII., or a Sixtus V.understanding his age and a new condition of society, and without deceiving himself as to the danger of the papacy in his own family, had given, or rather restored, to the cities of the Roman states that strong municipal independence which approaches so closely to political autonomy, and had called upon them almost to govern themselves, whilst still maintaining over them the title and form of the essential rights of sovereignty? I do not believe that the pope could become the king of a central constitutional monarchy, the nature and complexity of his power render this mode of government impracticable for him; but central constitutional monarchy is not the only form of good government; and I do believe

that the pope may readily become the chief of an aggregation of cities and provinces, governed each in its own locality by free institutions, and acknowledging his sovereignty, without being submitted to his absolute power. Nothing is more conformable to the history, manners, and traditions of Italy, neither is it incompatible with the nature and requirements of the temporal and spiritual authority of the papacy.... And if, as I think, the attempt at Italian unity and a Piedmontese dominion should fail, if several of the states now amalgamated should reclaim their independence, if the papacy in particular should preserve the provinces which still remain to it, and regain possession of any of those it has lost, it will be by calling on them to govern themselves through an energetic local organisation, that it will re-establish and exercise its dominion over them, without the dread of incessantly recurring insurrection."

That the states more immediately under the papacy, did not wait till these political combinations of Guizot were realised, cannot be charged upon them as an act of revolutionary precipitancy. Their intimate experience of the past had given them no insight into the philosopher's vision of the civil liberty and religious tolerance of the papacy of the future. They might even have conceived themselves justified in questioning the possibility of his ideal ever being translated into the actual, and a golden age of royal priests inaugurated. The problem of Guizot's is of impossible solution,-infallibility and the claims of catholicity given to construct in harmony with them a government on the principles of toleration and civil freedom. Can men play the god, or assume to govern on superhuman claims, but at the expense of their own moral nature, and the sacrifice of the rights of their fellow-men? The lie with which all priestly governments start ensures their demoralisation, whether their administrators be priests of Budda or Brahma, of Mahommed or professedly of Him whose name is above every name. Under the Jesuit profession, "all for Jesus," what crimes have been perpetrated,-crimes that have expelled these "holy men" from every kingdom of Europe, and made the name of Jesuit a synonyme for lies and intrigue! Under the still higher assumptions of the papacy, has the demoralisation been less flagrant ?

How long the union of the priestly and kingly powers is destined to survive, is now the question of Europe, and intensely though silently that of Rome herself. Her citizens are not uninterested auditors in the great discussion: denied their part in it, banished, imprisoned, dealt with as worse than the brigand and the assassin, if they venture to moot