answered far better than the doctrine of merit to the need of man's heart; they had only to be heard, to be eagerly received by longing souls. It is no insignificant witness to the worldwide and undying power of this great master, that his writings had only to be unearthed and read, to give birth, in Catholic countries, to a real, though one-sided and unconscious, Protestantism.

Let us, in conclusion, learn a practical lesson from Augustine's life. It is this. Nothing but Divine grace in the heart has power to subdue sin; but, by God's blessing, Divine grace can effectually subdue it in its most aggravated forms. And one other lesson may be remembered, especially in these times of rationalistic attacks upon the Scriptures. Not by the wisdom of the wise, not by the understanding of the prudent, not by the learning of the scribe, is the gospel apprehended; but to the meek, the lowly, and the loving does Christ manifest Himself; for it has seemed good to the Father to hide these things from the wise and prudent, and to reveal them unto babes.

H. N. B.

ROME AND ITALY: THEIR STATE AND PROSPECTS.

1. Rome in 1860. By Edward Dicey. Cambridge: Macmillan and Co.

2. Italy in Transition. By William Arthur. London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co.

3. A City for the Pope; or, the Solution of the Roman Question. By the Rev. Richard Burgess, B.D., &c. &c. London: Ridgway.

4. Allocuzioni detta dalla Santità di N.S. Papa Pio IX. nel Concistoro segreto del 18 Marzo 1861. Roma.

5. Count Cavour, his Life and Career. London.

By Basil H. Cooper.

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It is pleasant to us to trace the connection between England and Italy; to notice how the resurrection and the progress a great nation, which had fallen so low, may be ascribed in some measure to those remote islands of the North which the poets and historians of Rome branded as barbarous. In two ways England is discharging her debt to Italy: one way, which statesmen notice and politicians take account of; the other less ostensible, but not less important. For nearly forty years the Italians have observed the English resorting to their country; and among the many faults and follies we committed, they learned to value our habits and opinions. From our words and lives

they saw that private character may be pure, and that domestic life may be happy; and tracing these habits, which were strange to them, to their avowed cause, the English religion, they discovered that there may be a reality in a faith, and that all worship is not priestcraft. Scattered by the hands of many, endorsed by the lives of others, the religious writings which pervade England have for many years, though in secret, been circulated through Italy. And in Tuscany especially they have borne fruits which attracted the notice of a persecuting church and a despotic government, and led to the exile of men of station, and to the imprisonment of men of a humbler rank. Still, unaffected by this, the work went on, and English men and English women were diligent labourers in it.

Within our own days there came a different and more startling evidence of English influence. The last ten years have wrought a change in the political condition of Italy which has surprised the world. Within the last six years, a small country, Sardinia, tossed about and sacrificed for centuries in the struggles between Austria and France, reckoned of no account by the great powers of Europe, and hardly placed among the secondary states, has swelled at once from a despicable province into a great nation. The man to whom it owes the change, and who in the height of his work has been hurried from the scene, Cavour, avowedly formed his thoughts and modelled his political system on the institutions and the practice of England. With a fixed idea, which he held from his youth, that Italy would become a nation, and that he would be its minister, he prepared himself, a young Italian nobleman, for his future mission by coming to England, examining on the spot our customs, and studying what its statesmen said and did. He had read our history, he had traced the characters of our great statesmen in past times, he was familiar with the deeds and speeches of Chatham and Pitt and Canning, he observed us while our constitution was undergoing a change in 1832, and in that season of ferment when the principles of our polity, of our church, our education; and our poor laws were debated and settled by the ablest men, by Brougham and Peel, Stanley, Graham, and Russell, the young Italian sat under the gallery of the House of Commons, watched the turns of debate, heard the great speakers, and became imbued with the thoughts and opinions, the eagerness and the moderation of the English mind. Modelled on this type, there grew up under his hands the parliament of Piedmont, the limits of its monarchy, the freedom of its debates, its public press, and its trade. The firm character of the man, stamped by English sentiment, and imbued with English purpose, rose, at first single-handed, at length with a large following, to confront on one hand the prejudices of bigots and the traditions of the past, on the other

the passion for wild change and the vague theories of democrats. To this Piedmont owes her freedom as well as her religious liberty, and from this arose the restraints laid upon the church of Rome, which solved with English moderation that hard problem, how to keep a church endowed, which was in theory intolerant, yet to allow liberty to other minds. The statesman who has succeeded Cavour, and who inherits both his traditions and his virtues, Ricasoli, has passed his years, before he entered public life, in studying English writings and institutions.

As Italy has reached this point in her history through the example of England, it is interesting to ask, what is her actual position, and what are likely to be her prospects? On both points there is a keen controversy. On her political state one great party among us speaks with exulting satisfaction; another party, under the highest conservative authority, expresses regret and doubts. On her religious state there is an equal difference of opinion. Some, like her great orator Gavazzi, joyful and confident, predict the speedy downfal of Rome, and the establishment of an independent church; others, and they are by no means confined to the blind advocates and orators of the papacy, consider that such is the influence of the priesthood, and such the strong position of the pope as their head, that it is impossible to conceive any settlement of this problem, which would not either tear up the structure of society, or leave an insoluble difficulty in the heart of the Italian kingdom.

Let us address a word, at the outset, to one element, extrinsic to Italy, yet dovetailed into it and affecting it with a disturbing influence. What will France do, and how will Napoleon act? The papacy owes its maintenance in Rome to his troops. Will he keep them, or will he withdraw them? While we write, events may settle the question, and upset or supersede our calculations. No doubt the opinion of Cavour is just, that Napoleon's policy hangs on events; not daring or inventive, but wary and shrewd, waiting for circumstances to show what serves best to carry out the ruling idea of his mind, to make himself strong in France by feeding French vanity with the sentiment of French power. This idea ruled the great Napoleon; it guides the emperor, it explains his desire of peace, and his preparations for war. But the removal of his army from Rome encounters this difficulty: To let the pope fall to the ground, would be a shock and a scandal. It would disgust the faithful, it would infuriate the priests, it would turn against Napoleon the revenge and passions of thousands. This might hazard, perhaps would shake, his dynasty. Yet the position of his army in Rome is intolerable: it is odious to Italy, it is disgusting to his own soldiers, it involves him in the disgrace of the papal tyranny, it brings a stain on his own reputation, it damages him with a large party through Europe. Anything

which would rescue him from this position, and put an end to these disputes and difficulties, would be hailed by him as a godsend. For this he waits anxiously. To events and the unknown future he and we leave the problem.

But reverting to what is within Italy, and depends upon herself, we can speak with more certainty. The opinions of the Italians on the temporal power of the pope are clear. All the works which head our article give concurrent evidence; they show that a national patriotism has taken possession of the Italian mind. We lay aside the exception in the Neapolitan states, for we should hardly accept brigands as exponents of popular opinion. They have their objects, and do their work. Ever since we have known Italy, brigandage has been rife, from Terracina to the heel of Italy; the villages and woods of the Apennines have been infested by a set of robbers too lazy to work, but living by the plunder of strangers, and by levying black mail upon the villagers. These men have now received a large increase by the disbanded soldiers of the royal army, and by the outlaws of the Roman states, pushed out on this ill-fated province by Monsignor de Mèrode and his accomplices. Unluckily they were not dealt with at once. Government was weak and listless. They have become a body truly formidable from arms and numbers, and it will now take much time and labour to crush them. Even if they are driven from the precincts of Naples, they will be scattered through the mountains, and will lurk in the glens and highlands of Calabria; and as the Scotch Highlands were infested, after our Revolution, by the Campbells and Macgregors of their day, and as Ireland has been harassed down to our own times by Rapparees and Ribbonmen, it will take a generation before the embers of this fire are quite trodden out. But it will be done, if the hand of government is firm, and the firmer the grasp the quicker the cure. But in the rest of Italy, every one who talks and thinks, as Mr. Arthur shows us, the inhabitants of towns, tradesmen, artizans, women as well as men, have one mind and one voice. They will have a country, a king, a kingdom, a parliament, one capital. Before this united feeling all obstacles fall-the schemes of Napoleon, the designs of the exiled princes, the sympathies of Russia and Austria, and the projects of the Papists. If the pope continues to thwart this feeling by keeping Rome, the only result is to undermine respect and sympathy for the papacy. He has threatened excommunication; that threat has been met by laughter. Throughout Italy neither men nor women care for the pope's curse. If he orders the bishops to close the churches, the bishops are powerless against the people. A large body of the priests feel as citizens, and side with their country. Such a state of things, if it continues, must shake the foundations of the papal power. The length to which this danger has reached

has appeared unequivocally, and it has found able interpreters. Cavour, in one of his last speeches, let fall intelligible hints that the pope had better take the terms offered, as a schism was at hand. The parliament of Piedmont cut the knot with the sword. Three years ago they braved the pope and defied him. They suppressed the monasteries and convents; they trampled under foot the papal excommunication; they coerced the recusant bishops; they forced the priests to perform their religious services in spite of the pope. The same course has been taken last winter in the Neapolitan states. Ricasoli in Tuscany did the same. Milan and the whole of Lombardy set the like example. Garibaldi's language against the papacy was strong and plain-as strong as that of Luther or Savonarola; yet Garibaldi is the most popular man in Italy. When he lifted up his hand, two-thirds of Italy ran to his side. In the face of these facts, we cannot escape the evident conclusion: The Italians have made up their mind-no sovereignty for the pope-Rome, as a state, must fall. On the other hand, the On the other hand, the pope has spoken, and he has spoken as clearly as the people. In the same month, last March, in which Count Cavour expressed in the Italian parliament the views of Italy on the necessity of separating the spiritual and temporal power, the pope announced his decision in a solemn allocution. He maintains inflexibly the old traditions; no change, no modification, no concession; to give up one iota of his sovereignty is a sacrilege not to be endured. Thus, after all the warnings of the summer, and the ominous quarrel with general Goyon, comes another expression of the papal mind. Dr. Cullen gives it to the faithful in Ireland as a proof of the unflinching courage of the Holy Father. That it shows the incurable blindness and obstinacy of the Vatican, there is no doubt:

"His Holiness, in a brief discourse to the Sacred College, manifested the satisfaction which he felt at the conduct of the episcopacy, and the union of the greatest part of the clergy, and of so many millions of Catholics, who courageously opposed error and injustice, and showed themselves in a thousand ways devoted to the Holy See. But, at the same time, the Holy Father could not but deplore the aberrations of a bishop of the kingdom of Naples, and of many ecclesiastics of these provinces, the scandals of a notable party amongst the clergy of Milan, imitated by a chapter of the duchy of Modena, and the evil publications, at which have laboured some clergymen unworthy of their character, whether at Milan, where they have been reproduced by a bad journal which, by antithesis, takes the title of the Conciliator, or at Florence, where a perverse society, which calls itself the Society of Mutual Aid,' has deserved, on the part of the zealous archbishop of that city, a condemnation from which it has drawn some fruit. His Holiness also remarked on the evil results of the vacancy of so many Episcopal Sees in Italy, of which advantage is taken to lessen the salutary influence of the clergy over the morals of