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itself instinctively with rulers and aristocratic forces; it encourages, by the most skillful appliances, credulity and unquestioning acquiescence in its own opinions; it crushes selfassertion and individuality, and is the acknowledged enemy of modern liberty and civilization. The earnest men in Italy feel this so sorely that they hate the very name of religion from its associations with Roman Catholic priestcraft, oppression and superstition. They are most obstinate sceptics, not to say atheists, and there are not wanting religious men (Protestants) in Italy, who believe that the increase of scepticism and the spread of open infidelity is the only hope of any general escape from the baleful dominion of the Catholic Church. I must say that it seems to me probable that a considerable era of indifference to religion. must precede the revival of faith in any form compatible with freedom or true Italian nationality.

The hold which the Roman Church has on Europe is not duly estimated. It is still immense, and only measured by the vast ignorance and habits of dependence which mark a hundred million of its people. It possesses an enormous prestige in spite of its abuses, and its very theory of sacraments independent of personal sanctity in their duly consecrated administrators, prevents the corruption or weakness and ignorance of its priesthood from forming any substantial argument against its authority. Shaped by the tastes and accommodated to the weaknesses of the Southern character, it associates itself with all the pleasures of the people, and has a holiday flavor in its most sacred rites and serious hours. Sitting upon the steps of the high altar in the midst of the pontifical mass, I saw two bishops taking snuff in the Pope's presence as if no religious solemnity could withdraw their thoughts from such paltry self-indulgence. Then again, the Church is the support of so large a number of priests and

monks and nuns, and they are the representatives of so many families, that the whole people are entangled by their immediate interests in its maintenance. There are two hundred thousand ecclesiastics (including priests, monks, nuns) in Italy. About a quarter of all the Roman Catholic bishops in the world are resident on Italian soil, and they, by their numerous followers, add to the nightmare under which the country lies. The cardinals resident at Rome are little more than politicians in red stockings, whose chief occupation is outwitting the instincts and aspirations for light and liberty of the Italian people. In short, there is a conclave of acute, accomplished men of the world, sitting always in Rome, who have the advantage of being thought not men of the world, who devote their entire energies and combined wit and wisdom to balking and resisting every movement of the Italian people to rise above themselves and the superstitions that oppress them, and to drink of the new life and liberty of the nineteenth century. It is not the petty territory of the Church that the Italian government is hankering for, but for the suppression of a nest of political intrigue and artful obstacles to all forward and improving measures for the nation's resurrection. Rome is necessary to Italy because it plots against the nation from its very centre, and with powers that reach under Italy and move France, Spain, England, and even the United States.

There is still, however, an enormous power in this Roman Church, independent of the general doubts and suspicions which agitate its own bosom. I suppose its most acrid critics are persons still in its nominal or real communion; certainly it is hard to find an intelligent man (not a priest or a recent convert) in the Roman Catholic Church who does not speak sneeringly, despairingly or railingly against it. Judging by the state of public sentiment as expressed by the

Power of Tradition and Custom.

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thinking or talking men and women in Catholic Europe, you would declare the Roman Catholic Church an ocular illusion, or at best a vast ecclesiastical mansion in ruins, but too big to crumble out of sight, after having been long deserted by its whole inhabitants. But it is forgotten how large a part of Catholic Europe does not think nor even read and write ; how far these vast masses are removed from those who do, even when in personal proximity with them; and how much considered the passions and prejudices of this great mass of ignorance are and must be by the rulers. Then it must be remembered how all the political, social and domestic customs of Catholic countries have become, in the course of ages, interwoven with and shaped by the Catholic religion, and how dwarfed and confined and misdirected by its superstitions. The Roman Catholic faith is in the blood of the Italian people, however much it may be denied by their rising intelligence or intellectual convictions. It animates their hearts, dwells in their tastes, their associations and their passions. The most unbelieving of them can hardly keep the hinges of their knees from bending as they pass an altar, nor their fingers out of the font of holy water, nor from the trick of crossing themselves as they hear certain words that from childhood have been used to be followed by this manipulation. Nor must we forget how long a mechanical life continues to animate organizations which are dead in each and every member of them, but still live on, soulless corporations, by the mere habit or momentum of a prolonged and once intensely active existence. There is, too, a prodigious power in drill, independent of the strength of the individuals who enter into the mass that is marshaled. Like a mob without much personal passion, but with a common passion that is not a multiple of personal passions but a kind of contagious heat to which masses are subject (like the spontaneous com

bustion in the cold fibres of a bag of cotton), so the Catholic masses have a common faith and common esprit du corps, and a capacity for being led and marshaled, which does not spring from personal convictions, but from the force of old names and symbols and associations, and the dead weight of ages and numbers. It will take a great while to get the heat out of the body of the dead Church of Rome! Its huge bulk still warms millions of hearts, and its children nestle to it like an infant to a dead mother's breast, not missing the milk so long as there is animal heat left in the corpse.

Then, again, in Italy, alas! there is comparatively nothing to take the place of the Roman Catholic Church. Protestantism, with meritorious efforts, plants its standards wherever the government allows. The English Episcopal Church, the Scotch Presbyterian, the American Congregationalists, are all making sincere and self-sacrificing endeavors to minister to the religious wants of the few who will hearken to them. I would not disparage their exertions or their success; but, compared with the work that is demanded, their endeavors are infinitesimal, their encouragements feeble, and their effect upon the Italian population hardly worth naming. · Indeed, the types of religion they carry into Italy and elsewhere are often so small an improvement, from a dogmatic point of view, upon the superstitions they would supersede, that I do not wonder that the symbolic charms of the Romish ritual overbalance the advantage they possess of a somewhat less unreasonable fanaticism. "The Anglo-Continental Society," which held its annual meeting at Willis's Rooms, London, February 27, 1867, is a sample of the spirit which animates the largest of these Protestant bodies who are seeking to protestantize Catholic Europe. The Bishop of Ely, who presided, denied that the Anglo-Continental Society was a missionary body, or that there was any occasion to

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convert Roman Catholics; that the Roman Catholics and the Anglican Church were essentially one, and even agreed upon the most fundamental question—the supremacy of a man over the whole Church. "I say," was his language, "that there is one head of the Catholic Church on earth, and that head is a man; that that man is a king." This is precisely what the Roman Catholic Church asserts; only where it puts the Pope, the Bishop of course puts Christ. But the Bishop adduced the parallel not as a ground of separation, but as a basis of union. And he went on later in his speech to insist that, because of a common adherence to the doctrine of bishops and the Apostolic Succession, the Roman Catholic Church, the Greek Church, the Churches of Denmark and Sweden were essentially united, while, as the necessary inference, all un-Episcopal Protestantism is in another category and not of the Church Catholic. How much advantage to morals and piety, and the diffusion of the essential spirit of Christ, is to be gained by substituting the validity of Protestant ordinations, and the efficacy of Protestant sacraments, for the supremacy of the Pope, the worship of the Virgin and the hocus-pocus of the Mass? What progress has religious liberty and spiritual truth made when the question of "orders," or the official legitimacy of a Protestant priest, is substituted for the validity of a Romish one?

If Christianity is still to continue its appeals to superstition, still to drag men to heaven only by their religious fears and hopes, still to mutter spells and practice necromancy at her altars, she had much better revive the Romish Church than attempt to supersede it. Nothing that Protestants can do in that line will begin to compare with what Catholicism is doing, and has done to admiration for a thousand years. The Roman Catholic Church is upheld and not weakened by those absurd and effete pretensions. The Church of EnVOL. II.-C