The other brother, Diodato Dufournel—young, handsome, polished, rich—soon after the death of Alfred, met Father Gerlache at daylight entering St. Peter's: "I go to say a mass for our dead on the Apostle's tomb." "I go too," replied the Captain, and they entered the crypt. The priest asked the zouave what had caused his strange absorption in prayer. "Father, I was praying to the Virgin for the favour of dying for Holy Church." Ten days afterwards he fell mortally wounded during the Garibaldian disturbance in Rome. When the white-headed father arrived, it was too late to see either son alive, but he was instantly received by the Pope. The sovereign tried to fasten on his breast the order of the Piano, but was blinded by his tears. Maria, the sister of Diodato and Emmanuel, came between the two weeping old men, and, guiding the hand of the Pope, fastened the decoration on the breast of her father. The writer concludes by representing the ladies of the house hereafter as pointing out to their little ones the glove, the sword, the fatal ball, and other relics, the victor palm and the exulting angels, and saying, "Their souls are in paradise, lovely and resplendent, and are interceding for us. Children, kneel down and pray to God that none of our family may degenerate from the example of Diodato and Emmanuel Dufournel!"
Bishop Senestrey, of Regensburg, known as a pupil of the Jesuits and an ardent Ultramontane, made a speech at Schwandorf, which has not yet been forgotten in Bavaria, and was soon heard of in other parts of Germany. He said—
We Ultramontanes cannot yield. The antagonism can have no issue but in war and revolution. A peaceable settlement is not possible. Who makes your temporal laws? We observe them only because a force stands behind which compels us. True laws come from God only. Princes themselves reign by the grace of God, and when they have no longer a mind to do so, I shall be the first to overturn the throne.[144]
To the Germans, who were just rising to a consciousness of their unity, the threats of breaking them up again were cruel, especially when coming from within. "The foreigner," said Sepp, "has always counted on the internal splits in the German oak, to drive in his wedge, and rend us to pieces."
The scorn with which talk of recognizing Italy was treated at this proud moment, may be judged from the words of the Unitá for January 27, in an article headed, Dying with Italy or Living with the Pope. The Marquis de Moustier, it remarks, having promised to study a modus vivendi, proposed by Menabrea, was seized by mortal illness. In a similar way Morny, Wallewsky, Petri, and Billault were struck with death, by urgent study of means for making revolution live side by side with the Pope.
Parliamentary government, hateful everywhere, was viewed as monstrous in Italy. The Civiltá cannot "accurately study" the proceedings in Florence, because of "the ineffable weariness, the disgust, the disdain with which the mind is seized, on reading those speeches, often vulgar, and running over with sophism and effrontery."[145] It proceeds to say that the famous boons of 1789, liberty of worship, liberty of meeting, liberty of the Press, and liberty of instruction, led in practice "to the triumph of irreligion, to the tyranny of the State, to unbridled licence in handling through the Press the most sacred and inviolable rights, and to the barbarizing of the young by more infamous ignorance." Yet, at the same time, it records with satisfaction efforts of its own friends to obtain liberty of instruction, after their ideal; that is, the State giving up to the priest the control of what is taught to its subjects with its own money.
The Civiltá gloried in the disappearance of the Liberal Catholic priests, utterly extinguished, as it held, by the Syllabus and by the prospect of the Council. There might still linger some slight remnant of Liberal Catholics among the laity. But Catholics in Italy were now to be noted for their hope, their joy, and their perfect withdrawal from political life. They were no more to be found seeking situations from the government, but were all ardently drawing close to Pius IX. Since he uttered the "prophetic word," Let us wait upon events, above all since the Council was summoned, they had betaken themselves to pious works and to waiting on the hand of the Almighty.[146]
In the same publications which struggled against unity of nations, the loss of another unity was bitterly deplored. "Catholic unity" in Spain, hitherto existing by law, alas! exclaims the Stimmen, exists in fact no longer. By religious unity is meant the state of things which forbids men to worship God except under direction of the Pope. Massimo D'Azeglio exclaimed as to Italy, Religious unity is the only unity we have left. We should say, No wonder!
The attempt to place the unity of Christians not in faith in Christ and manifestation of His spirit, but in subjection to one human being, has had just the same results as had the attempt to place the unity of mankind in obedience to one sovereign, treating all who did not yield as enemies. Human unity is larger and nobler than one throne will ever shadow, and so is Christian unity. The lust of uniformity that erected the Inquisition, fettered the Press, sentenced free opinion and free speech to death, reformed the Decalogue, and laid bonds upon the Bible, has never given a nation rest, and has only been an endless source of division and scepticism. Azeglio, in the same breath in which he speaks of this "unity," calls Italy "the ancient land of doubt," where even at the time of the Reformation people thought little of Rome and nothing of Geneva. And the Stimmen says that those Spaniards who had broken down "religious unity" were "not Protestants but sceptics."[147] So that in both Italy and Spain the result of that uniformity which is no unity, was scepticism in religion and decay in politics.
To the race the bond of unity lies in a common Father, and to the Church in a common Lord. In the one case and in the other the maintenance of unity consists not in putting down variations, but in treating them with brotherly regard.