How far do the villages of the thrice beautiful Sabina exceed those of our Lake District or of Wales in that poetic property of all villages, "innocence"? The last thing we should do is to set up our own as a standard. But if you hear the friars talk of the villagers, and the villagers of the friars and police, the townsfolk of the countryfolk, the doctor of his practice, and the priest of the refractory, you will hear mention made, with incidental ease, of crimes which, if committed in the Lake Districts of England, or in the tourists' haunts in Wales, would fill the journals for weeks. And how often here does scandal name the priest before all others!
Do the towns in Papal territory contrast with those in "lay States" as the oasis does with the desert? Suppose the observer to stand before Subiaco, seated amid Sabine peaks in the smiling valley of the Anio—a favourite haunt of artists, and worthy of their favour. A marble arch marks the entrance to the town; a summer palace of the Pope crowns it. A little way off stands the sacred cave where Benedict first taught. That is the Lupercal of Roman monasticism. There arose the institution which became the one grand public institution of Papal Italy—arose out of purposes not only pure, but lofty, though upon plans departing from those both of Moses and of Christ. These made the love of God in the individual a spiritual force to leaven the family, and made the family the basis of all institutions. The monasticism of the further east made spiritual life a dainty too delicate for the fireside. The Christian system made each new convert a moral agent acting within the social fabric. When Christians adopted the Oriental system, each new convert was abstracted from the social fabric, was taught to turn his or her back on the family, and to call being in the family being in the world, and renouncing the family renouncing the world. Out of a life of three-and-thirty years spent among men, our Lord has left us scarcely another trace of thirty of those years than this, that He spent them in the family.[71] This convent of Benedict still preserves its celebrated gardens, boasted of as a beauty for the whole earth—including the bed of roses, the lineal descendants of those which were transformed from thorns by miracle.
On the principles of Christianity, if this place has for ages enjoyed a spiritual government free from religious error, and a temporal one free from moral fault, and has, in addition, been blessed with the presence of the representative of God upon earth, we shall without fail find it a scene of enlightenment, righteousness, and bliss. It must in these respects be far before places where frail human nature has been in the hands of churches liable to err, and of governments which commit faults every day. If, on the other hand, they who have here been stewards of the unrighteous mammon have employed it ill, who will entrust to them the true riches, who will give to them the keeping of his soul?
At the entrance of the city, on a morning in May, the sound of chanting floats down the street, and a procession of clergy moves along, passes under the marble arch, and proceeds to a church in the suburbs. Then the priests bless the fields to secure good crops, as is done by the priests in India.
The streets of the city paraded by this procession are not beautiful, and had they been steeped for a few years in a smoky, moist Lancashire atmosphere they would be exceedingly ugly. They are not clean but dirty, below the condition of any country town in the Protestant parts of Ireland. They are not busy, but have a listless air, as if people had little to do and not much heart in doing it. The signs of enterprise and of improvement which in towns under good governments silently tell the tale, are not to be seen—signs which already, in 1867, might be traced in most of the towns of the New Italy. The well-dressed portion of the people is small, and the proportion of those poorly but tidily dressed extremely small. A gala costume even of the poor is fine, for whatever is for effect is studiously done. Many men and women, evidently not in abject poverty, but capable of dressing up for a state occasion, are not tidy, but badly the reverse. The number of ragged adults is great, and that of ragged children very great; it is hard to estimate that of the beggars, for even young women employed and not very miserably dressed, will take advantage of a passing stranger to seek a penny; and as to the children, begging appears to be a recognized branch of street life.
A young gentleman from Rome, tall and handsome, on the point of getting into a carriage with his companions, anxiously inquires if the road to Palestrina is safe. Have there not been attacks of brigands lately? The fact is not denied, though he is assured that all will be well. In any talk about quarrelling, the use of the knife—that is, the dagger-knife—is alluded to as a common incident. When any occurrence illustrates the amount of confidence felt by the people in the honesty or truthfulness of one another, it seems generally low on the first point and almost nil upon the second.
If the working classes show no sign of having been blessed with a government better than that of all mankind, does any sign of it appear among the trading classes? Beginning at the upper strata of finance and commerce, a merely English eye would look in vain for tokens of their existence. Coming down to the shops, perhaps an episcopal city in the "oasis" would so impress Roman Catholic shopkeepers from Thurles or Tuam that they would think a comparison profane. Their evil lot has been cast in a lamentable portion of the "desert," the misdeeds of whose rulers, and the wrongs of whose pastors and people, have often made the hearts of the devout in Italy to bleed. Protestant shopkeepers of Munster and Connaught would not be so awestruck but that they could make a comparison. They would not find under the fairer sky, and the theocratic rule, what they would take for symptoms of divine superiority. The shopkeepers of Enniskillen and Portadown, not blessed even with a heretic bishop, would smile at the comparison.
As to the professional classes, they are nearly absorbed in the clergy; for this is a state in which the only way to "found a family" is to begin by taking vows of celibacy, and the only way to bequeath coronets is to begin by renouncing the world. The one unworldly profession counts, among its prizes, a triple crown, scores of princedoms, ministries of state, of finance, and even of war, embassies, exceeding many palaces, honours surpassing those of nobility, gorgeous uniforms, lofty titles, revenues of enormous amount, with powers and dignities bearing a double value—one measurable by the standards of the world, and one immeasurable in the eyes of the faithful. The bulk of the land has passed into the possession either of corporations of clergy or of families founded by priests successful in their profession.
The Mosaic economy is generally taken to be more carnal than the Christian; but Moses, leaving Egypt, where the king and the priests were the only landowners, enacted that the priests should not hold land, and though married men, should have only a house and "a cow's grass." Here, on the contrary, the priest, though renouncing the world in some spiritual sense, comes a hundredfold more into possession of it in a material one. If mind shows its dominion over land and sea, over adamant and wind, over time and space, the feat is labelled for contempt as "material progress." If ministers of the Gospel become immersed in the management of manors, provinces, taxes, lotteries, and even of brigades, the fall is certificated for reverence as "spiritual" ascendancy. In Israel the royal tribe was one "of which no man gave attendance at the altar," and the priestly tribe one of which none came to the throne. Here the priest is king, and the temporal prince kisses his foot. A favourite image is that of the mystic David, pastor and king in one. Here is the cure of political naturalism.
The clergy of the Pontifical States included the two widest extremes of professional life to be found in Christendom—that of show and dressiness beyond what our courtiers or soldiers display, and that of personal meanness and social degradation to which no professional class among us approaches. Society seemed to avenge itself for the humiliations it had to suffer from the court priest, by the contempt with which it treated the clown priest. We once asked an advocate if all the priests did not read the Unitá Cattolica, and we give his reply, not as describing what priests are, but as showing what men of education may say of them—"All?" said the Dottore; "well, nearly all that can read." "But you do not mean to say that there are priests who cannot read?" "Well, not precisely; but there are many that could not read a journal intelligently, so as to enjoy it."