Even in this mountain valley the villages still keep to the heights. Where is the squire and his generous hall?—no room here for his magisterial office or commanding influence! Where is the farmstead, full and cozy, warm nest of fruitful brood sure to store a land with golden eggs? When the squire was quenched under the mitre of the abbot, the farmer was smothered in the cowl of the friar. Where are the parsonages and manses, homes where thought-culture is generally at the maximum, and external show often at the minimum, Christian families rooted in nature, blessed by divine ordinance, where woman is doing what the Mother of our Lord was doing at the head of her house—families holier a hundred times than the "religious" family, artificially substituted for nature and gospel? If from the list of bright names written up in England since the Reformation were blotted all that were first inscribed in the family Bible of parsonage or manse, that list would be more shortened than most men would imagine.
From the Villa d'Este at Tivoli, with its grandiose, ill-kept gardens, the prospect across the Campagna, when the distant city and its unique dome are limned against the sunset sky, is one of rare enchantment. Suppose that on these Sabine or on the Alban Hills you ask some intelligent inhabitant if these are not the Delectable Mountains, the summits of the true Celestial Empire, where no act of moral wrong has been done by the authorities for, say, the last ten hundred years. Perhaps you might hear such a statement as we once heard. It was from a gentleman in the pay of the government; but he knew that he had not to speak either to a priest or to that denationalized creature which Romans soon detect under the English form, a convertito. The statement may not have been correct. But it was such as under our unblessed lay government is never heard. It was such as under a good government could never be invented. Such a statement, professing to be made from a man's own knowledge, one never heard in Europe, except in Naples under the last two kings; but one might hear such in Egypt, and one could easily hear such, many years ago, in the Mysore, from old men talking of the times of Hyder Ali.
The desolation of the Campagna is the true and terrible material progress. Here physical impediments to health and life have conquered, not being encountered by moral and mental force. What natural riches are here! If England has wealth in its coal, how much has Italy in its sunshine? How much has that saved in the last thousand years in clothes, bedding, and fuel? How much in the wear and tear of buildings, and of implements? How much has it given in ripening what we can never ripen, and in ripening quickly and perfectly what we can ripen but slowly and in part? How much has it both saved and given in diminishing the physical temptation to intemperance? This soil, this sun, and in addition the tribute of nations, poured out here for ages in all the endless forms of Peter's gain—where is all that wealth gone? Here we are amid the riches of nature, to which successive centuries have brought riches of tribute, and yet are we wrapped around by silence, vacuity, and fear. Sleep not here! whispers every friendly voice. Wealth of matter, poverty of man! The Papal government is sometimes accused of bringing the malaria. No; it only let it come and let it stay. Like many who will not believe in invisible mind, it would not believe in invisible matter. The miasma was the hand of God, and was not to be fought against.
The Papal government is also accused of bringing all the foreign hordes who wasted this once glorious plain. It did not always bring them. It only brought them so often that had it been done by any faction in the heart of a country not being priests, mankind would have sunk the memory of the faction under eternal disgrace. Now, the sickly Campagna labourer, the thing like a Fijian hut which to him is home, and the buffalo, seem a meet monument to the memory of Saracen and Lombard destroying, and of Cardinals plundering, till only the grass was left. Who would have the heart to ask himself, Is this the proof that the oasis of priests amid the desert of lay States, is a garden planted of the Lord?
Roughly speaking, Rome is about the size of Dublin. All the Catholic world sighs over the woes and desolations inflicted on Ireland by Protestant cruelty. Where has Rome set up a suburb like Kingstown, Dalkey, or Bray? Where sown a tract of country with rich smiling homes like those which spangle the emerald from Dublin to the Wicklow hills? Where in the oasis could a bishop on returning to Belfast point to a creation of wealth and beauty made in Papal times equal to Holywood, or the Antrim shore? And could his colleague of Cork dare to make the people who look on the lone banks of the stream from Rome to the sea mourn for those who hang their harps by the "pleasant waters" that flow within sound of the bells of Shandon? Had the Roman Curia reigned there, the vale would now be insecure; a wretched village or two, with skeletons and clouts by way of relics in tawdry churches, would crown the heights; instead of villas, mansions, and cots, a monastery or two walled up to heaven would hold the best points on the hills, inviting artists, but perhaps ill rewarding them, while nursing idlers within and beggars without. And had Rome less reigned at Cork than she has done, a scene many degrees livelier and richer than that which now surrounds the fair city would have noted the response of intelligent industry to the boons of a very bountiful Providence.
Inside the capital of the oasis!—capital of a region where for a thousand years, at the very least, no act morally wrong has been done by authority, true bower of a peerless Eden! Let no Englishman say that these pretensions are not to be treated seriously. We should all have said so thirty years ago. But now men from any nation in Europe, some blaming us, some vaunting over our return, will tell us that of late years more has been done to accredit these pretensions by a portion of the English clergy than by any educated class in Europe, and that more to adorn and sanction these pretensions has been done by a portion of the English aristocracy than by any privileged class in Europe. This is one instance more of the fact that not interests but principles are the safeguards of mankind.
Is the city, then, morally the perfection of beauty? Is it so rich in the Christian graces as to accredit the claim to be the central seat of an infallible power, the one spot on earth where it is directly touched by a divine authority? The priest at once tells you how holy the city is: there are eight basilicas, more than four hundred churches, and more than two hundred convents. Yes, but perhaps the "religious family" fabricated by teaching woman that her holy place is not the family which God founded, and in which every man has his own wife and every woman her own husband, may not in operation have proved a better thing than the Christian family. Poor creatures put into an artificial family where duties ordained by God are made void, and ties set by Him as strings in the harp of nature to make holy melody, are rudely unstrung—a "family" in which many of the things called good works are neither virtues nor graces, but vain repetitions of fantastic forms—a family where the obedience called for is not obedience to any natural authority or to any divine law, but to arbitrary will; communities of poor creatures such as these, we say, may not in the long run have proved centres of holiness. When we ask if the city is holy, we mean nothing about basilicas, or churches, or convents; but we mean, are the people like Jesus Christ, like a people prepared as a fit population for a sinless heaven?
We shall in reply give nothing but a statement on one side from the Civiltá, and one on the other from the prelate Liverani, so that neither heretic nor foreigner, nay, not even a layman, shall disturb the testimony. The Civiltá,[72] after the occupation of the city by Italy, showed that one of its characteristics had been the perfect subordination of all civil arrangements to evangelical law. Christ reigns, Christ governs. This motto had in Rome a worthy and complete application. Not only individuals, but the family, the city, laws, policy, all social institutions, felt the salutary influence. In the metropolis of Christianity, marriage, education, instruction, the administration of justice and charity, public and private manners, had to be regulated by Christian laws and evangelical principles:—