But as Italy is geographically one, it ought, we are told again, to be politically one. The United States, Canada, and Mexico, including Central America and British Columbia, are geographically one; but will any of the honorable or reverend gentlemen who addressed the meeting, or wrote letters to the committee that called it, contend that we have, therefore, the right unprovoked, and simply because it would be convenient to have them politically a part of our republic, to invade them with our armies, suppress their present governments, and annex them to the Union?
"Rome is the ancient capital of Italy, and the Italian government wishes to recover it, and needs its prestige for the present kingdom of Italy." But in no known period of history has Rome ever belonged to Italy; Italy for ages belonged to Rome, and was governed from and by it. Never in its whole history was Rome the capital of an Italian state, or the seat of an Italian government. She was not the capital of any state; she was herself the state as long as the Roman Empire lasted, and as such governed Italy and the world. The empire was not Roman because Rome was its capital city, but because Rome was the sovereign state itself, and all political power or political rights emanated, or were held to emanate, from her; and hence the empire was Roman, and the people were called Romans, not Italians. If you talk of restoration, let it be complete—recognize Rome as the sovereign state, and the rest of the world be held as subject provinces. Italy was never the state while Rome governed, nor has the name Italy at all times had the same geographical sense. Sometimes it meant Sicily, sometimes the southern, other times the northern, part of the peninsula—sometimes the heel or the foot, and sometimes the leg, of the boot.
It might or it might not be desirable for the pretended kingdom of Italy to have Rome for its capital, or the seat of its government, though we think Florence in this mercantile age would be far more suitable. But suppose it. Yet these Protestant ministers must know that there is a divine command that forbids one to covet what is one's neighbor's. Achab, king of Israel, wanted Naboth's vineyard, and was much troubled in spirit that Naboth would not consent to part with it either for love or money. His queen, the liberal-minded Jezebel, rebuked him for his dejection, and, fearing to use his power as king of Israel, took measures in his name that Naboth should be stoned to death, and the vineyard delivered to Achab. It was all very simple and easily done; but we read that vengeance overtook the king, fell heavily on him, his household, and his false prophets; that Jezebel fled from the Avenger, was overtaken and slain, and "the dogs came and licked up her blood." There is such a reality as justice, though our American sympathizers with the liberal and enlightened Jezebel seem to have forgotten it.
Dr. Stevens, the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Pennsylvania, rejoices at the spoliation of the Pope, the absorption of the Roman state, and the unification of Italy, because "Italy is thus opened to liberal ideas, and Rome itself unlocked to the advancing civilization and intelligence of the nineteenth century." Which advancing civilization and intelligence are aptly illustrated, we presume, by the recent Franco-Prussian war, the communistic insurrection in Paris, the prostration of France, the nation that has advanced farthest in liberal ideas and nineteenth-century civilization. We have here on a fly-sheet a specimen of the liberal ideas to which Italy is opened, and of the sort of civilization and intelligence to which Rome is unlocked. We extract it for the benefit of Bishop Stevens and his brethren:
"Religions said to be revealed," these free-thinkers tells us, "have always been the worst enemy of mankind, because by making truth, which is the patrimony of all, the privilege of the few, they resist the progressive development of science and liberty, which can alone solve the gravest social problems that have tormented entire generations for ages.
"Priests have invented supernatural beings, made themselves mediators between them and men, and go preaching always a faith that substitutes authority for reason, slavery for liberty, the brute for the man.
"But the darkness is radiated, and progress beats down the idols and breaks the chains with which the priesthood has bound the human conscience. Furiously has raged the war between dogma and the postulates of science, liberty and tyranny, science and error.
"The voice of justice, so long silenced in blood by kings and priests conspiring together, comes forth omnipotent from the secret cells of the Inquisition, from the ashes of the funeral pile, from every stone sanctified by the blood of the apostles of truth. People believed the reign of evil would last for ever, but the day is white, a spark has kindled a conflagration. Rome of the priests becomes Rome of the people, the Holy City a human city. She no longer lends herself to a hypocritical faith, which, by substituting the form for the substance, excites the hatred of people against people solely because the one worships a God in the synagogue and the other in the pagoda.
"The association of free-thinkers is established here most opportunely to give the finishing stroke to the crumbling edifice of the priesthood, founded in the ignorance of the many by the astuteness of the few. Truth proved by science is our creed; respect for our own rights in respecting the rights of others, our morality.
"It is necessary to look boldly in the face the monster which for ages has made the earth a battle-field, to defy him openly and in the light of day. We shall therefore be true to the programme of civilization, in the name of which the world has applauded the liberation of Rome from the Pope, and we call upon all who love the moral independence of the family, prostituted and enslaved by the priest, upon all who wish a country great and respected, upon all who believe in human perfectibility, to unite with us under the banner of science and justice.
"To Rome is reserved a great glory—that of initiating the third and most splendid epoch of human civilization.
"Free Rome ought to repair the damage done to the world by sacerdotal Rome. She can do it, and she must do it. Let the true friends of liberty be associated, and descend to no compromise, no bargain with the most terrible enemy the human race has ever had."[48]
This programme of the Association of Free-thinkers in Rome is not an inapt commentary on the letter of the Bishop of Pennsylvania, and is a hearty response to the sympathy and encouragement given them in their work of destruction by the great and respectable New York meeting. It at least tells our American sympathizers how their friends in Rome understand their applause of the deposition of the Pope from his temporal sovereignty and the unity of Italy. Are they pleased with the response given them?
There may be a difference between the free-thinkers and their American friends; but the chief difference apparently is, that the free-thinkers are logical and have the courage of their principles, know what they mean and say it frankly, without reticence or circumlocution, while their American sympathizers have a hazy perception of their own principles, do not see very clearly whither they lead, and are afraid to push them to their last logical consequences. They have not fully mastered the principles on which they act; only half-know their own meaning; and the half they do know they would express and not express. Yet they are great men and learned men, but hampered by their Protestantism, which admits no clear or logical statement, except so far as it coincides with the free-thinkers in regarding the Papacy as a monster, which must, in the interests of civilization and liberty, be got rid of. Yet we can discover no substantial difference in principle between them. The deeds and events they applaud have no justification or excuse, save in the atrocious principles set forth by the free-thinkers. We are willing to believe these distinguished gentlemen try to persuade themselves, as they would fain persuade us, that it is possible to war against the Papacy without warring against revealed religion or Christian morals, as did the reformers in the sixteenth century; but these Roman free-thinkers know better, and tell them that they cannot do it. They understand perfectly well that Christianity as a revelation and an authoritative religion and the Papacy stand or fall together; and it is because they would get rid of all religions that claim to be revealed or to have authority in matters of conscience, that they seek to overthrow the Papacy. They attack the temporal sovereignty of the Pope only as a means of attacking more effectually his spiritual sovereignty; and they wish to get rid of his spiritual sovereignty only because they wish to rid themselves of the spiritual order, of the law of God, nay, of God himself, and feel themselves free to live for this world alone, and bend all their energies to the production, amassing, and enjoying the goods of time and sense. It is not the Pope personally, or his temporal government as such, that they call the worst enemy of mankind, or the "monster that for ages has made the earth a field of blood," but revealed religion, but faith, but the supernatural order, but the law of God, the spiritual order, which the Pope officially represents, and always and everywhere asserts, and which his temporal power aids him to assert more freely and independently. They recognize no medium between the Papacy and no-religion. They disdain all compromise, admit no via media, neither the Anglican via media between "Romanism" and dissent, nor the Protestant via media between the Papacy and infidelity. They war not against Protestantism, though they despise it as a miserable compromise, neither one thing nor another; they even regard it with favor as a useful and an efficient ally in their anti-religious war.
The free-thinkers in Rome and elsewhere present the real and true issue between the Papacy and its enemies, and give the real meaning of the atrocious deeds which have effected the deposition of the Pope, the absorption of the state of the church, and the unity of Italy under the House of Savoy. They present it, too, without disguise, in its utter nakedness, so that the most stolid cannot mistake it; precisely as we ourselves have uniformly presented it. The issue is "the Papacy or no-religion," and the meaning of the deeds and events the New York meeting applauded is, "Down with the Papacy as the means of putting down religion and emancipating the human conscience from the law of God!" How does the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Pennsylvania, and his brother Protestant Episcopal bishops among the sympathizers with Italian unity, like the meaning or the issue, when presented truly and honestly, and they are forced to look it squarely in the face? What does Mr. Justice Strong, of the Supreme Court of the United States, think of it? He is the president of an evangelical—perhaps we should say fanatical—association, whose object is to procure an amendment to the preamble of the Constitution of the United States, so that the republic shall be made to profess, officially, belief in God, in Christ, and the supernatural inspiration of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. What says he to the assertion that "religions said to be revealed have always been the worst enemy of mankind"? Yet his name appears among the sympathizers with Italian unity. Do these gentlemen know what crimes and atrocities they applaud, and what is the cause with which they express their sympathy? Or, like the old Jews who crucified the Lord of Life between two thieves, are they ignorant of what they do?
These Roman free-thinkers only give us the programme of the secret societies, who have their network spread over all Europe, and even over this country; of the Mazzinis and Garibaldis, of the Red Republicans and Communists, who have instituted a new Reign of Terror in Paris, who are filling the prisons of that city while we are writing (April 7) with the friends of order, with priests and religious, plundering the churches, entering and robbing convents and nunneries, and insulting and maltreating their peaceful and holy inmates, banishing religion from the schools, suppressing the public worship of God, and drenching the streets in the blood of the purest and noblest of the land, all in the name of the people, of liberty, equality, and fraternity—the programme, in fact, of the whole revolutionary, radical, or so-called liberal party throughout the world. The realization of civil liberty, the advancement of science, the promotion of society, truth, and justice, are—unless, perhaps, with here and there an individual—a mere pretext to dupe simple and confiding people, and gain their support. The leaders and knowing ones are not duped; they understand what they want, and that is the total abolition of all revealed religion, of all belief in the spiritual order, or the universal, eternal, and immutable principles of right and justice, and the complete emancipation of the human intellect from all faith in the supernatural, and of conscience from all the law not self-imposed.