"Ah! You are right; I had got so absorbed in my own thoughts, that if you had not roused me, I know not when I should have come to my senses again; and in order that it may not happen again, be kind enough to reply to some doubts which I have in my mind. Now, Father, tell me, where do you think we shall be carried with all these contentions about Religion?"
"It would be too long a subject to discuss; but I have faith that it will lead to good. For my part I believe Luther is a Cerberus, who barks because they do not throw him the bone: but he bit the leaves, not the root; he tore the fringe, but not the cloth. He is as tiresome as a criticism, and lasts only because the fault lasts: if the Church only purify herself in the mystic waters, Luther and all the renovators would at once fail. Already they do not agree among themselves in building the new Babel; the ancient miracle of the confusion of tongues is again commencing, they all run through paths where there is no exit. These troubles will pass, but before they pass, I fear a great many other new ones will be added: when the human intellect has rebelled against authority, it must wear itself out in the path of proud reasonings. Imagining that superstitions and errors are the necessary evils of religion, they will all join together to destroy them; and I foresee these to be days full of sorrow: I foresee again renewed the vinegar and gall, the thorns, the blows, the nails, and the spear-wound of Christ; I see doubt as a wind coming from the desert withering the harvest of Faith, Charity, and Hope. But since man cannot reach the celestial seats with the simple light of reason, he will stand appalled in contemplating in the heaven an abyss like hell, and shall feel again the need of a God, who may have had grief, love, and feelings of humanity, and will seek Christ again, who, as it is said He did with St. Francis, will unloose his arms from the cross to embrace him. Thus, religion becoming again the bridesmaid of human souls, after having espoused them in this world with the ties of love, will direct them towards the eternal home to which we all aspire, which is in heaven."
"These seem to me things that may happen some time or other at the last judgment. Let us leave heaven, for, as you say, it would be a long discourse; but of this earth, of this which we call our country, this Florence, this Italy, what do you think?"
"My son, she is dead; no, not dead ... the sleep which oppresses her has the appearance of death ... but this sleep is so heavy that it seems to me that without a miracle of God she can never awake again. Know, know, my son, that oppressors cannot tyrannize, if the oppressed do not consent to be tyrannized over; nor does the difficulty consist in taking away the tyrant, but in the virtue of the citizens in maintaining themselves in freedom and honest fellowship. This city, at the time of the death of Alexander, showed how a people can remain slaves, although the tyrant be dead; and this is what regards national independence: as to foreign independence, God is strong, and takes part with the strong. These foolish people think to get rid of Spain by means of France, of France by means of Spain, and they stretch their hands humbly now to the latter, now to the former, those hands which should have been armed to threaten and to strike both of them.—Out with the barbarians! cried the glorious Pontiff Julius II.; and the barbarians were all those who were not born in Italy. Oh, foolish people! who believe that the chivalry of Spain or France are going to leave their splendid castles, their wives and children, encounter the perils of the sea, climb over the precipitous summits of the mountains, and come in your country merely to fight a tournament, and give the reward of it to you lazy men, who stand looking on. Oh, fools! the people who know not how to defend the home which nature has given them, are not worthy of possessing it: the world belongs to those who take it; thus has the law of destiny decreed. Louis XI. made France a united and strong kingdom; Charles V. had the same idea with regard to Germany and Spain. The over-rated Lorenzo dei Medici, what did he accomplish? With jugglers' tricks he kept in discordant equilibrium the remnant of a people. It was not a monument, but a pasteboard statue; and the first wind that blew from the Alps overturned it: Charles VIII. rode over Italy with wooden spurs. Now we are broken into fragments. The Italian people stood watching the death of the Florentine Republic like a fighting gladiator: at her glorious death all applauded, no one helped her; and falling, the Republic wrote with its blood upon the arena a cruel sentence, and which shall come to pass: You also will fall, but infamously. Venice believes herself seated upon a throne, but she is sitting instead upon the grave which shall cover her. Genoa, like the swallow having made its nest in a lofty place, imagines itself secure, and does not think of the hunter's arrow, that reaches even to the clouds ... I breathe an air of tombs, I trample an earth of churchyard...."
"Then, Father, if it is so, allow me to quote a passage, written some hundred and more years ago by a worthy priest and canon of the Church, who had more brains than a thousand such as I, which said:
O fools and blind, to labor night and day,
In fruitless toil, when soon around our clay
Our mother's cold embraces shall be thrown,
Our deeds forgotten, and our names unknown![47]
"Mark, however: first, heaven has not granted me the gift of prophecy, and as I may perchance be mistaken, thus it behooves us to do what is right without giving ourselves the thought of what may happen; secondly, that I once heard from my teacher, that a God and a people, although dead, cannot long remain within the sepulchre; and in truth, our Saviour only remained in it three days. The days of the people are indeed centuries; but men pass away like shadows, humanity remains. Every good seed brings forth good fruit before God, and at its proper time will sprout to enliven the earth; if we shall not eat of it, let us save it, for our children shall. Thirdly, I told you that I deemed her not dead, but oppressed by mortal lethargy. It would avail me nothing, and in truth I hate to spend the life which God has granted me in sculpturing a splendid marble tomb, to place within it the corpse of Italy, and then deck myself in majestic funeral clothes, light candles upon golden candlesticks, fill the censers with perfumes, and chant with divine notes the prayers for the dead. This I hate, although I see it done, with infinite bitterness to my soul, by men of noble talents but feeble hearts.... Have you ever heard about Queen Joanna, the mother of Charles V.? When her husband Philip, whom she loved so much, died, she would not allow him to be buried, but had him embalmed, and placed him upon a rich bed of black velvet, and as long as she lived she sat at his side, watching from time to time if he would not awake: this was charity and insanity. I imitate this charitable example wisely, since I do not consider our country dead, but as if asleep by enchantment; and I watch her day and night, uttering over her the words of love, but oftener still of grief and anger; at times with reviving salts, or other stimulants, I endeavor to recall her to life; at other times I thrust my hands in her hair, or put to her lips a living coal as God gave to Isaiah, or I pierce her flesh near the heart to see if from thence gushes out living blood. Indeed ... indeed, so far my words have been in vain, and entire locks of her hair have remained in my hands.... But if when about to awaken, these words of anger, grief, and love, these deeds of charity or disdain should be able to break this lethargy from her head for one moment, or even a second before the time fixed by fate, would not my life, the lives of a hundred citizens be well spent?"