Such are the glories of Italy free from the Alps to the Adriatic! If, in spite of her presumptuous farà da se, she was obliged to have recourse to a foreign hand in order to rise, and still needs a foreign arm to stand erect, she will, according to appearances, have need of no one to aid her in falling: she will topple over of herself. The so-called free country is only an enslaved kingdom—a vassal, a satellite without strength and without prestige.
III.
Of all the Italian formulas that have served to mislead the liberal mind, there is not one more odiously false and deceptive than the too famous expression, A free church in a free country. History has already interpreted it, A persecuted church in an enslaved country. The revolutionary factions that have assumed the authority have imposed thereon the complete execution of their plan, and we know that the Masonic lodges, though they denounce Mazzinian deism, have fallen into the atheism of Renan, al fondo!
The sacrilegious frenzy of the Revolution, and the madness of those that encouraged it, have been stigmatized in forcible terms by the august prisoner of the Vatican:
“Unbelief assumes an air of authority, and proudly stalks throughout the length and breadth of the earth, doubtless imagining it is to triumph for ever.... Woe to those who are linked with the impious, and dally with the Revolution under the pretence of directing it! Sooner or later they will be drawn into the abyss. The recent disasters at Naples may be adduced as an example. A great number of curious people, heedless and devoid of all prudence, hastened to get a nearer view of the devouring flames issuing from the fearful mouth of Vesuvius, and many of them became victims of mistaken curiosity. So it is with those who covenant with the Revolution and the revolutionists, hoping to overrule the former and keep down the latter. Rash people! they will all become a prey to the flames that surround them on every side.”[263]
The revolutionary lava floods the streets of Rome and covers the whole Peninsula. It began in the cities, spread into the country, and will end by swallowing up the army. The universities and common schools are invaded, the torrent engulfs the workshops and stalls, and undermines the walls of palaces. Princes even have opened their gates at its approach. In vain the Holy Father sounds the cry of alarm; in vain his prime minister publicly denounces the progress of the deadly current—party spirit seems to have paralyzed all in authority.
We will not describe the exploits of this new Islamism against the papal power. The history of its ambuscades and pillages is sufficiently well known. There never was a richer treasure of dishonor for revolution to endow a people with. “The title of liberators was all the same retained.” Yes, all the same!
Joseph de Maistre somewhere refers to an English functionary as saying that every man who spoke of taking an inch of land from the Pope ought to be hung. “As for me,” adds the witty writer, “I cheerfully [pg 802] consent, in order to avoid carnage, that hung should be changed to hissed.”[264]
Let us wait. An avenging God will do both: subsannabit, conquassabit. Had the plots of the unionists merely aimed at the temporal power, perhaps divine justice would have been satisfied with a hiss at the hour of some Italian Sedan, but the gibbet—it is a law of history—is reserved for persecutors and apostates.
When the Sardinian government knocked at one of the gates of Rome, as it awaited a propitious moment for battering it down, it bound itself before all Europe to solve the problem of the separation of church and state which had puzzled all the doctors of liberalism, and of which it pretended to have found the key. It was said the Roman question and the Italian question were to cease to be antagonistic, or, at least, they were to resemble those rivers that, while mingling their waters, preserve their own colors, as we see in the Rhône and the Saône. It was promised a channel should be made wide enough for this double current of opinions. Hence the origin of the famous law of the Guarantees. This scheme of conciliation is properly appreciated in the Etudes sur l'Italie Contemporaine: