My real difficulty is, that he speaks of his author with great respect, and evidently thinks his doctrine sound and profitable.
Now Rosmini, allowing for some superficial proposals of reform, was a thorough believer in the Holy See. His book itself, by the nature of the reforms proposed, implies that no other defects of equal magnitude remain to be remedied. Apart from the Five points he accepts the papacy as it stands; and he has no great objection to it, Five points included.
He was what we vulgarly call an ultramontane—a reluctant ultramontane, like Lacordaire. An Anglican who views with satisfaction, with admiration, the moral character and spiritual condition of an Ultramontane priest, appears to me to have got over the principal obstacle on the way to Rome—the moral obstacle. The moral obstacle, to put it compendiously, is the Inquisition.
The Inquisition is peculiarly the weapon and peculiarly the work of the Popes. It stands out from all those things in which they co-operated, followed, or assented as the distinctive feature of papal Rome. It was set up, renewed, and perfected by a long series of acts emanating from the supreme authority in the Church. No other institution, no doctrine, no ceremony is so distinctly the individual creation of the papacy, except the Dispensing power. It is the principal thing with which the papacy is identified, and by which it must be judged.
The principle of the Inquisition is the Pope's sovereign power over life and death. Whosoever disobeys him should be tried and tortured and burnt. If that cannot be done, formalities may be dispensed with, and the culprit may be killed like an outlaw.
That is to say, the principle of the Inquisition is murderous, and a man's opinion of the papacy is regulated and determined by his opinion about religious assassination.
If he honestly looks on it as an abomination, he can only accept the Primacy with a drawback, with precaution, suspicion, and aversion for its acts.
If he accepts the Primacy with confidence, admiration, unconditional obedience, he must have made terms with murder.
Therefore, the most awful imputation in the catalogue of crimes rests, according to the measure of their knowledge and their zeal, upon those whom we call Ultramontanes. The controversy, primarily, is not about problems of theology: it is about the spiritual state of a man's soul, who is the defender, the promoter, the accomplice of murder. Every limitation of papal credit and authority which effectually dissociates it from that reproach, which breaks off its solidarity with assassins and washes away the guilt of blood, will solve most other problems. At least, it is enough for my present purpose to say, that blot is so large and foul that it precedes and eclipses the rest, and claims the first attention.