They who earnestly believe in the supremacy of the moral law as the sole legitimate source of all authority—in a religion of duty, of which politics should be the application—cannot, through any amount of personal abnegation, act in concert with a government based upon the worship of temporary and material interest.
Our rulers have no great ruling conception,—no belief in the supremacy of the moral law,—no just notion of life, nor of the human unity,—no belief in a divinely appointed goal which it is the duty of mankind to reach through labor and sacrifice. They are materialists, and the logical consequence of their want of all faith in God and his law are the substitution of the idea of interest for the idea of duty,—of a paltry notion of tactics, for the fearless affirmation of the truth,—of opportunity, for principle.
It is for this that they protest against, without resisting, wrong,—for this that they have abandoned the straight road to wander in tortuous by-paths, fascinated by the thought of displaying state-craft, and forgetting that it was through such paths we first descended into slavery. It is for this that our government has reduced Italy to the condition of a French prefecture, and that our parliamentary opposition copies the wretched tactics of the Left in the French Chamber, which prepared the way, during the Restoration, for the present corruption, degradation, and enslavement of their country.
These things, I repeat, are consequences, not causes. We may change as we will the individuals at the head of the government; the system itself being based upon a false principle, the fatal idea will govern them. They cannot righteously direct the new life of the Italian people, and redeem them from a profound unconscious immorality of ancient date.
The present duty of the democratic party in Italy, then,—since they cannot serve God and Mammon,—is to educate the people; and, remembering that the basis of all education is truth, to endeavor to prove to them that the actual political impotence and corruption of Italy are derived from two causes which may be summed up in one,—we have no religion, and we have set up a negation in its place.
II.
On the one side we have—as our only form and semblance of religion—the Papacy.
I remember to have written, more than thirty years ago, when none other dared openly to venture on the problem,—when the boldest contented themselves with whispering of reforms in Church discipline, and those writers who, like Gioberti, set themselves up as philosophers, thought proper, as a matter of tactics, to caress the Utopia of an Italian primacy, intrusted to I know not what impossible revival of Catholicism,—I remember to have written then that both the Papacy and Catholicism were things extinct, and that their death was a consequence of quite another death.
I spoke of the dogma which was the foundation of both.
Years have confirmed what I then declared. The Papacy is now a corpse beyond all power of galvanization. It is the lying mockery of a religion,—a source of perennial corruption and immorality among the nations, and most fatally such to our own, upon whose very soul weighs the incubus and example of that lie. But at the present day we either know or ought to know the cause of this.