A Decade of Italian Women, vol. 2 (of 2)

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

HER RELIGIOUS LETTERS.

These letters, from which a stray fragment of biographical interest has been gathered here and there, are mainly filled with fervent religious exhortations, conceived in a spirit that can leave no doubt of the heartfelt sincerity of the writer. They are for the most part free from any advocacy of the more revolting doctrines of Calvinism, and insist chiefly on the vanity of earthly interests, hopes, and pleasures, and the necessity of God's free grace, to enable us to choose the better path. Those especially to her sister, to Lavinia della Rovere, and to Anna d'Este, are long, urgent, and affectionate exhortations to hold all things nought for Christ's sake. They may be found at length, translated into French, in M. Bonnet's work. But it has seemed to me unnecessary to occupy the present pages with any specimen of these writings, inasmuch as any page of them, divested of the names of persons and places, which mark their authorship, would be absolutely undistinguishable from many millions of pages which have been, and are still being, written and printed on the same subjects. It may be remarked, however, that the manner is more that of the evangelical writers of the nineteenth than of the seventeenth century. It is wholly undisfigured by the undue familiarity, low imagery, and grotesque phraseology, which often marked the efforts of writers determined at any cost to rouse, at least, the attention of their readers, if they could not carry with them their intelligence.

As her health declined rapidly, she felt, and frequently expressed, that desire to quit this world and its toils, and to be at rest with God, which is deemed by religionists of the kind called evangelical, to be the most sure and satisfactory indication of a healthy and desirable condition of soul. Thinkers of a different class see only a proof of failing bodily powers in those manifestations, which, to the former, are assurances of increasing spiritual vigour. They find it quite in accordance with all the recognisable operations of the Creator, that in well–regulated minds the desire to live should become weakened, together with the physical incapacity for life; but wholly out of all analogy with His government of the world, that man's highest spiritual excellence should coincide with, or even be compatible with, a diseased condition of the machine, by means of which the spirit has to act and develop itself; and still more, if possible, inconsistent with the ways of God to man, that man's highest state of efficiency for duty should be specially marked by his desire to leave the scene of it.

Olympia's willingness to die, normally and mercifully (a tautological expression!) accompanied the increasing certainty that she could not live. It is true, that the world around her, in all that most nearly touched her affections, hopes, and fears, was becoming from day to day more cheerless and distasteful to her. The prospects of the Reformers were every where becoming more and more gloomy. Already internal schism was vexing Rome's schismatics!

PERSECUTION INCREASES.

"I am not ignorant,"[130] writes Olympia to Vergerius, "that a great controversy about the sacrament has arisen among the reformed. But this would easily have been put an end to before this, if men would think less of their own glory, and more of that of Christ, and the safety of his Church." Pope Paul IV. would have re–echoed the sentiment with most entire approbation!

Then, again, tidings of increasing persecution were coming in from all parts. In England, Mary had succeeded to the throne. And Olympia hears that Bernardino Ochino, of Siena, has been obliged to fly thence, and take refuge at Geneva. From France the news was even worse and worse. From Italy it was to Olympia the worst of all.

"My last letters from Italy," she writes to Chilian Sinapi,[131] "bring me the sad news that the Christians at Ferrara—(this is not the only passage of Olympia's writings in which she, by implication, denies that the Romanists are Christians)—are suffering from the most cruel persecution. The great and the little are equally exposed to suffering for conscience' sake. Some are loaded with chains. Some are condemned to exile. A remnant find their safety in flight. My mother has continued firm amid the storm. All honour be to God therefor. I entreat her to come out from that Babylon with my sisters, and to join me in this country."

To complete the gloom of the material horizon around her, pestilence broke out in Heidelberg in the early summer of 1555. And once again it became the physician's duty to be found in the van of the battle against it. Yet it was hard to be called on to leave the bedside of his now evidently dying wife, at every daily and nightly call. But he was strengthened in the path of his duty by the exhortations of Olympia.

Bad news also came from Curione. Both he and his daughter were struck down by illness. He recovered shortly, however; and it would be strange, if the inconsistency were not generic rather than peculiar to Olympia, to observe, that she, who welcomed death as a spiritual blessing to herself, and deemed her so welcoming it to be a mark of spiritual grace, "wept with joy at hearing that her friend had been snatched from the tomb."