Napoleon's failure with Pio Nono. 871 it, they are yet all ear to the progress of the debate, and wait their time for action. The sound of the bugle, and the tramp of the military in every street in Rome, proclaim the force by which the priest-king is now upheld; and that his is a power willingly bowed to no longer. The opposition to the office is irrespective of the character of him who now fills it. The protest of the Romans against the sovereign pontificate is because of its inherent essential antagonism to the rights of conscience and the rights of citizenship. If the mere accident of the person who for the time wields the priestly government could have reconciled the Romans to its intolerable yoke, the genial manners, kindly nature, and blameless private life of the present pontiff might have put off its day of doom. It must be allowed he wished to act better than his predecessors: though baffled in his well meant efforts, he speedily threw up the reins and found a more easy and congenial employment in excogitating new dogmas for the exaltation of the Madonna, than in reforming the abuses of the papacy. Pio Nono, if not precipitating the downfall of the papal temporal power, has not the talents to stay its dissolution. He opposes to the dissolution the traditionary immobility of the papacy, and it crumbles in his grasp. He lacks the genius to deal with the crisis in which he finds himself. He has not even the devout instincts of a Ganganelli to know the men to rally around, and the men to banish from his throne. And yet if the mere respectability of a pope could save the kingship of the papacy, Pio Nono were the man for his time. But the Roman people have announced their resolute non possumus as well as their sovereign, and Pio Nono is not ignorant of it, and that their resolution is unalterably taken. Since the hour that the best blood of Rome was shed under the banners of Garibaldi in defence of the city, the position of its citizens has not only been taken, but sealed by the blood then shed, and the pope knows that from it there will be no retrogression. The encyclical of last December may be fairly read as his involuntary acknowledgment that his non possumus cannot be permanently maintained against the non possumus of his subjects. It has all the indications of a last speech and dying confession, of the work of one who knows he must die, yet would die game. It is the act of the great papal Cæsar gathering up his mantle at the base of Pompey's statue, feeling he has received his death wound. It has been the anxious endeavour of the Emperor of France to avert the fall of the sovereignty of the papacy, yet in no part of his policy has he shewn less of his characteristic penetration than in his hope of averting it by reconciling the government of the pope to the practices and manners of modern civilisation. In this hope he has persevered, and for this issue brought the full force of his great influence to bear on the papacy, but only to experience a defeat as signal as his efforts have been persistent. Judging of its interests from his own point of view, and by those of his new-born rule, he failed to realise its tremendous entanglements with the traditions of the past, grown into a second and irresistible nature, and its consequent conviction that, in the preservation of these intact, lay the secret of its power, and of its command of the homage and reverence of men. Reconcile itself to modern progress like the new emperor of France, and yet hold tight like him the reins of government-impossible! Its charm, it knows, would be dissolved the moment it stepped down from its transcendental claims and stood on the common mundane ground of progressive sovereigns taking and giving to the vox populi. The papacy gives forth the unalterable vox Dei, and let it fall from that claim, its bubble bursts, the mighty pageant is dissolved, and leaves not a wreck behind. The Encyclical is the assertion of this necessary policy of the papacy. It is its proclamation to Europe that its fountain of life and that of the Emperor of France are not the same, that what is life to the Emperor would be death to it. It lives on traditions that are in antagonism with modern progress, and with modern progress it perishes. Pio Nono has said this, and said this truly in his Encyclical, and he hopes by saying it to gain more than by reading to Europe any new-born confession of his reconciliation with modern ideas. He knows he could not occupy his throne a day in Rome on the principles of modern progress. He may not occupy it long in spite of his heroic manifesto of that faith of the past, by which the papacy subdued kingdoms, out of weakness was made strong, put to flight the army of the aliens, and did all things but work righteousness. In undertaking to school the papacy into harmony with modern progress, the Emperor of France has forgotten not only the mystic traditions in which Rome has found her strength, but the experiment of Pio Nono in that same line of modern progress, so little encouraging to popes, which cost him for a season his purple, compelled him to an ungainly flight, and to an unhonoured residence at Gaeta. That era of Pio Nono's life has branded itself into his heart in indelible hatred, or rather terror, of liberalism, which in his understanding means all thought that has not come out of the depths of the middle ages, and all institutions that are identified with the protestant nations of Europe, or that Pio Nono's Annihilation of the Heretics. 873 have sprung from their influence. The Encyclical is the authoritative embodiment of these convictions. But that Encyclical is some centuries too late to rally Europe around a falling papacy. Pio Nono has wielded the magic traditions of the past; but where has been the response from living hearts? Its reception has proclaimed that the nineteenth is not the twelfth century, and that Pius the Ninth is not Peter the Hermit. The Encyclical has confessedly failed to get up a crusade save against its own doctrines. To the holy city in danger it has summoned no strong arm. It has imperilled the solitary one that has been its thankless defender against its own subjects. France, Spain, Portugal, every catholic nation in Europe, has in succession reclaimed against its doctrines. They have resented it as an attempt to subject them to a servitude exceptional even in the palmiest days of the sovereignty of the papacy; and in the incapacity of Rome to reconcile itself with the requirements of an advancing civilisation, they have read the sure evidence that it has entered upon the era of its decline and fall. Even the Romans, in anticipation of the opinion of Europe, saluted on its appearance the Encyclical of their master with a sentence that bespoke their discernment of its reaction against himself, an anticipation that rendered it not the less acceptable to them-"Il Santo Padre ha ricevuto L'oglio Santo.' Yet in spite of the protest of catholic Europe against its doctrines, and the reaction it has developed against the papacy itself, Pio Nono clings to the Encyclical as the glory. of his reign. At the celebration of the annual illumination in honour of his return from Gaeta, held last spring at the close of the Easter season, his delivery of the Encyclical ex cathedra, crowned with his tiara, and surrounded with his ministers, was the subject of a grand picture. The picture was the attraction of the evening to the Rotonda-the piazza of Rome, which is redeemed from its own essential meanness and filthiness by the overshadowing majesty of the Pantheon. When lighted up with a thousand star-like lamps, crowded with the sight-gazers of a gala night, and jubilant with the music of one of the choicest of the Roman bands, this picture was shewn suspended aloft on a broad frame on the side of the piazza opposite the solemn colonnade of the grand old temple. It was set in an arch surmounted with the arms of the pontiff, and these again surmounted with a cross. At our first glance, as we were borne in front of it by the crowd, we read off its design-that it was a complimentary picture to the pope, recalling the publication and symbolising the triumphs and results of the Encyclical. We VOL. XIV.NO. LIV. M m 66 thought, as these had been manifestly to the hurt of the papacy, that the pope and his advisers would have suffered the Encyclical quietly to have dropped out of sight, the sooner forgotten the better; but Rome is as unwilling to acknowledge her blunders as her errors. There Pio Nono sat enthroned, the central figure of the great picture, clothed in his flowing pontifical robes, and crowned with his triple crown; and to leave no doubt as to the design of the picture, an open book rested on his knee, on one page of which you read, "Encyclical, 8th December 1864," on the other, Syllabus." In his left hand were grasped the keys, his right was extended in the act of announcing or enforcing the doctrines of the Encyclical. On one side of the throne stood his vicar; his prime minister, Antonelli (shewn in a portrait to the life), stood on the other; the two by their presence witnessing to the unity of the councillors of the Vatican, and to their entire accordance with their master in the publication of the Encyclical; while beyond them, in listening attention, and hanging on the pontiff's lips, stood the bishops of all countries. Behind the bishops were gathered groups of the faithful, offering their oboli in testimony of their submission to the common father, and in practical protest against the heretics he condemned, and doubtless in admonition to the withholders of Peter's pence. The oboli were dropped into large silver cups, which yet did not appear too large for the gifts poured into them. In attestation that a higher than the pontiff inspired the Encyclical, at the top of the picture, and right over the pontiff's chair, the heavenly dove was seen descending upon him; and above the dove Christ in the clouds commissioning three angels to proceed against the condemned heretics, who, rushing with long spears, struck to the heart the monster, half man half wolf, by which they were personified, hurling him from the height he had occupied, with all his rebel crew, to destruction and death. In contrast with his fate, three angels were seen on the opposite side of the picture, hastening to shower blessings on the heads of the faithful, and dropping these as garlands of the flowers of paradise on St Peter's, and the worshippers who thronged around it. And that nothing might be wanting in evidence of the sacred zeal of the pontiff, the extreme foreground of the picture shewed a large brazier blazing with fire, fed, not by faggots, but with books, from amidst the flames of which you could distinctly descry the names of Arius, Voltaire, Renan, Calvin, Luther. To sum up the conception of the whole picture, there was attached to it an epigrafe, which, in deference to the reverential feelings of our readers, we leave untranslated, so gross Miscellaneous Intelligence. 875 is the caricature it presents of the divine word, "Let there light": "Per la bocca di Pio tuona il Signore, E sul novello Caos delle genti 1 Judged by the discordant utterances of that evening in the crowd of the Piazza Rotonda, "la bocca di Pio" has a great work before it ere all error is cast out. The picture which proclaimed it vanquished, but stung it into life. Whirled by the crowd into the midst of an animated group of French soldiers, we found their effervescing indignation ready to overflow in some overt act in vindication of France insulted by Voltaire burning in the pope's brazier; whilst a German, whom we afterwards came across, with difficulty suppressed his graver choler as he beheld Luther's name emerging from the flames. For ourselves we felt no wrath at the sight of Calvin blazing in the pope's caldáno, having been long assured that when Rome lighted up an auto-da-fe for books or for men, John Calvin would have the hottest place. We accepted of his position in the picture as the testimony of those most competent to judge of the thoroughness of the work of the great theologian, whether directed against Rome's unseriptural ecclesiastical organisation, or against her unscriptural dogmas. We reserve for a subseqent article the fuller treatment of the present relations of the papacy to its Roman subjects. VIII. MISCELLANEOUS INTELLIGENCE. General Assembly of the American Presbyterian Church.. Ar the meeting of this body at Pittsburg in May last, a warm discussion took place on the state of the country, and on the measures which should be adopted in regard to those brethren in the Southern States who were chargeable with complicity in the late war, Stringent resolutions were ultimately adopted, the spirit of which may be judged of by the following specimen: "Church courts are ordered to examine all applicants for church membership by persons from the Southern States, or who have been living in the South since the rebellion, concerning their conduct and principles on the points above specified, and if it be found that, of their own free will, they have taken up arms against the United States, or that they hold slavery to be an ordinance of God, such persons shall not be admitted to the communion of the church, till they give evidence of their repentance for their sin, and renounce their errors." |