"Do not deceive yourself, Most Holy Father; this is the present state of Europe.
"But humanity cannot exist without a heaven. The idea of society is only a consequence of the idea of religion. We shall have then, sooner or later, religion and heaven. We shall have these not in the kings and the privileged classes,—their very condition excludes love, the soul of all religions,—but in the people. The spirit from God descends on many gathered together in his name. The people have suffered for ages on the cross, and God will bless them with a faith.
"You can, Most Holy Father, hasten that moment. I will not tell you my individual opinions on the religious development which is to come; these are of little importance. But I will say to you, that, whatever be the destiny of the creeds now existing, you can put yourself at the head of this development. If God wills that such creeds should revive, you can make them revive; if God wills that they should be transformed, that, leaving the foot of the cross, dogma and worship should be purified by rising a step nearer God, the Father and Educator of the world, you can put yourself between the two epochs, and guide the world to the conquest and the practice of religious truth, extirpating a hateful egotism, a barren negation.
"God preserve me from tempting you with ambition; that would be profanation. I call you, in the name of the power which God has granted you, and has not granted without a reason, to fulfil the good, the regenerating European work. I call you, after so many ages of doubt and corruption, to be apostle of Eternal Truth. I call you to make yourself the 'servant of all,' to sacrifice yourself, if needful, so that 'the will of God may be done on the earth as it is in heaven'; to hold yourself ready to glorify God in victory, or to repeat with resignation, if you must fail, the words of Gregory VII.: 'I die in exile, because I have loved justice and hated iniquity.'
"But for this, to fulfil the mission which God confides to you, two things are needful,—to be a believer, and to unify Italy. Without the first, you will fall in the middle of the way, abandoned by God and by men; without the second, you will not have the lever with which only you can effect great, holy, and durable things.
"Be a believer; abhor to be king, politician, statesman. Make no compromise with error; do not contaminate yourself with diplomacy, make no compact with fear, with expediency, with the false doctrines of a legality, which is merely a falsehood invented when faith failed. Take no counsel except from God, from the inspirations of your own heart, and from the imperious necessity of rebuilding a temple to truth, to justice, to faith. Self-collected, in enthusiasm of love for humanity, and apart from every human regard, ask of God that he will teach you the way; then enter upon it, with the faith of a conqueror on your brow, with the irrevocable decision of the martyr in your heart; look neither to the right hand nor the left, but straight before you, and up to heaven. Of every object that meets you on the way, ask of yourself: 'Is this just or unjust, true or false, law of man or law of God?' Proclaim aloud the result of your examination, and act accordingly. Do not say to yourself: 'If I speak and work in such a way, the princes of the earth will disagree; the ambassadors will present notes and protests!' What are the quarrels of selfishness in princes, or their notes, before a syllable of the eternal Evangelists of God? They have had importance till now, because, though phantoms, they had nothing to oppose them but phantoms; oppose to them the reality of a man who sees the Divine view, unknown to them, of human affairs, of an immortal soul conscious of a high mission, and these will vanish before you as vapors accumulated in darkness before the sun which rises in the east. Do not let yourself be affrighted by intrigues; the creature who fulfils a duty belongs not to men, but to God. God will protect you; God will spread around you such a halo of love, that neither the perfidy of men irreparably lost, nor the suggestions of hell, can break through it. Give to the world a spectacle new, unique: you will have results new, not to be foreseen by human calculation. Announce an era; declare that Humanity is sacred, and a daughter of God; that all who violate her rights to progress, to association, are on the way of error; that in God is the source of every government; that those who are best by intellect and heart, by genius and virtue, must be the guides of the people. Bless those who suffer and combat; blame, reprove, those who cause suffering, without regard to the name they bear, the rank that invests them. The people will adore in you the best interpreter of the Divine design, and your conscience will give you rest, strength, and ineffable comfort.
"Unify Italy, your country. For this you have no need to work, but to bless Him who works through you and in your name. Gather round you those who best represent the national party. Do not beg alliances with princes. Continue to seek the alliance of our own people; say, 'The unity of Italy ought to be a fact of the nineteenth century,' and it will suffice; we shall work for you. Leave our pens free; leave free the circulation of ideas in what regards this point, vital for us, of the national unity. Treat the Austrian government, even when it no longer menaces your territory, with the reserve of one who knows that it governs by usurpation in Italy and elsewhere; combat it with words of a just man, wherever it contrives oppressions and violations of the rights of others out of Italy. Require, in the name of the God of Peace, the Jesuits allied with Austria in Switzerland to withdraw from that country, where their presence prepares an inevitable and speedy effusion of the blood of the citizens. Give a word of sympathy which shall become public to the first Pole of Galicia who comes into your presence. Show us, in fine, by some fact, that you intend not only to improve the physical condition of your own few subjects, but that you embrace in your love the twenty-four millions of Italians, your brothers; that you believe them called by God to unite in family unity under one and the same compact; that you would bless the national banner, wherever it should be raised by pure and incontaminate hands; and leave the rest to us. We will cause to rise around you a nation over whose free and popular development you, living, shall preside. We will found a government unique in Europe, which shall destroy the absurd divorce between spiritual and temporal power, and in which you shall be chosen to represent the principle of which the men chosen by the nation will make the application. We shall know how to translate into a potent fact the instinct which palpitates through all Italy. We will excite for you active support among the nations of Europe; we will find you friends even in the ranks of Austria; we alone, because we alone have unity of design, believe in the truth of our principle, and have never betrayed it. Do not fear excesses from the people once entered upon this way; the people only commit excesses when left to their own impulses without any guide whom they respect. Do not pause before the idea of becoming a cause of war. War exists, everywhere, open or latent, but near breaking out, inevitable; nor can human power prevent it. Nor do I, it must be said frankly, Most Holy Father, address to you these words because I doubt in the least of our destiny, or because I believe you the sole, the indispensable means of the enterprise. The unity of Italy is a work of God,—a part of the design of Providence and of all, even of those who show themselves most satisfied with local improvements, and who, less sincere than I, wish to make them means of attaining their own aims. It will be fulfilled, with you or without you. But I address you, because I believe you worthy to take the initiative in a work so vast; because your putting yourself at the head of it would much abridge the road and diminish the dangers, the injury, the blood; because with you the conflict would assume a religious aspect, and be freed from many dangers of reaction and civil errors; because might be attained at once under your banner a political result and a vast moral result; because the revival of Italy under the ægis of a religious idea, of a standard, not of rights, but of duties, would leave behind all the revolutions of other countries, and place her immediately at the head of European progress; because it is in your power to cause that God and the people, terms too often fatally disjoined, should meet at once in beautiful and holy harmony, to direct the fate of nations.
"If I could be near you, I would invoke from God power to convince you, by gesture, by accent, by tears; now I can only confide to the paper the cold corpse, as it were, of my thought; nor can I ever have the certainty that you have read, and meditated a moment what I write. But I feel an imperious necessity of fulfilling this duty toward Italy and you, and, whatsoever you may think of it, I shall find myself more in peace with my conscience for having thus addressed you.
"Believe, Most Holy Father, in the feelings of veneration and of high hope which professes for you your most devoted
"JOSEPH MAZZINI."