THE

CHURCH QUARTERLY REVIEW.

No I. OCTOBER 1875.

ART. I.-ITALY AND HER CHURCH.

1. Discorsi del Presidente del Consilio, Marco Minghetti, sulla Politica Ecclesiastica. Roma, Tip. Botta, 1875. 2. Discorso del Deputato C. Tommasi-Crudeli sulle Relazioni dello Stato colla Chiesa. Roma, Tip. Botta, 1875. 3. Discorso del Deputato Guerrieri-Gonzaga sulle Relazioni dello Stato colla Chiesa. Roma, Tip. Botta, 1875.

4. I Parroci Eletti e la Questione Ecclesiastica. Di Carlo Guerrieri-Gonzaga. Firenze, Civelli, 1875.

5. Lettera della Fabbriceria di S. Giovanni del Dosso al Sindaco di Quistello. Mantova, Tip. Segna, 1873. Corresponding letters from Paludano, March, 1874, and Frassino, March, 1874.

6. Statuto Dogmatico-Organico-Disciplinare della Chiesa Cattolica Nazionale Italiana. Napoli, Morano, 1875. 7. Otto Mesi a Roma, durante il Concilio Vaticano. Per Pomponio Leto. Firenze, Le Monnier, 1873.

8. Cenni Biografici Documentati di Monsig. Domenico Panelli, Arcivescovo Cattolico di Lydda. Estratto dal Periodico L'Emancipatore Cattolico, Anno xiv. No. 15.

9. Libera Chiesa in Libero Stato: Genesi della Formola Cavouriana. Di Guido Padelletti. Estratto della Nuova Antologia. Firenze, Luglio, 1875.

LET no susceptibilities, Puritan, Protestant, Anglican, or other, be startled if we observe that Rome is and may long be, in some important respects, the centre of the Christian world. It is indeed a centre which repels as well as attracts; which

probably repels even more than it attracts; but which, whether repelling or attracting, influences. It need not be feared; but it ought not to be overlooked: as the navigator fears not the tides, but yet must take account of them. It influences that wide Christendom in which England, with its Church, is but an insulated though not an inconsiderable spot. The political power of England is great; but its religious influence is small. The sympathies even of nonconforming England with continental Protestantism are, and must be, partial: the dominant tone and direction of the two are far from identical. The Church, though in rather more free contact than our Nonconforming bodies with the learning of Protestant Germany, is of course more remote from its religious tendencies. The Latin communion forces the Church of England more and more into sharp antagonism: and we are only beginning to sound the possibilities of an honourable but independent relation of friendship with the East. In matter of religion, poetry might still with some truth sing of the penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos. We have of all nations the greatest amount perhaps of religious individuality, certainly of religious selfsufficiency. A moral as well as a natural sea surrounds us, and at once protects and isolates us from the world. But this is of course in a sense which is comparative, not absolute. The electric forces which pervade the Christian atmosphere touch us largely, outer barbarians though we be; and they touch us increasingly. And a multitude of circumstances make us aware that, if we are at least as open to criticism as our neighbours, yet we have like them a part to play in Christendom, and a broad field to occupy with our sympathies, under the guidance of such intelligence as we may possess.

In the endeavour to discuss the scope and limits of this field, we should above all things beware of the temptation to exact from others either the adoption, or even the exact appreciation, of our insular and national peculiarities. Community of first principles is that for which we needs must look, not identity in the form of development. Now, in the religion of the Reformed English Church, the conservation of authority is a first principle, and the restoration of freedom and of the respect due to the individual conscience is another: and if there be anything, claiming the name and dignity of a first principle, which it has been specifically and more than others given to the Church of England to uphold, it has been the maintenance in their just combination of these two great vital forces, and the endeavour to draw from their contact an harmonious result.

Let us now, turning our eyes towards Italy, inquire whether we have anything, or anything special, to do with it in reference to the religious question which lies so perilously near its seat of national life. And first, Italy is the country, in the very heart of which has been planted that ominous phenomenon, unparalleled in history, the Temporal Power of the Popedom. In the claim of the Latin Church to territorial sovereignty, the nations of Europe generally may be thought not to have any other than a secondary concern. But for Italy it is palpably matter of life and death. We do not enter into the question whether any of the possibilities of the past years would have permitted the co-existence of a solid Italian nationality together with a Popedom exercising temporal dominion. It doomed her to the weakness and dishonour of existing only in fractions. If the head was to be independent of the body, the members of the body loved also to be independent one of another. The subtle observant intelligence of Macchiavelli, and more than two centuries before him, the vast, all-embracing genius of Dante, saw in the Triregno the bane of their country. It seems as though their prophetic insight had been fully vindicated by the picture we now behold, where the Pope-King and the NationalKing, confronting one another on the same spot of ground, represent an incompatibility that cannot be overcome or softened. Italy must cease to be a nation, or the Papacy must consent to the mutilation of the triple crown.

So far as this problem is one of material forces, it seems to depend primarily on Italy herself. And in this view it has been settled, settled, with a settlement taken to be final. But it does not depend wholly or ultimately on Italy. There is a doctrine which had at one time the countenance even of Montalembert, and which we do not know that he ever retracted. According to this doctrine, all members of the Latin communion, dispersed throughout the world, are invested with a right of proper citizenship in Italy, which deprives the people of that Peninsula of the right to dispose of their own soil, and which authorises this fictitious entity, this non-resident majority, to claim that in the very heart of the Peninsula a territory shall be set apart from their jurisdiction, for the purpose of subserving the spiritual interests of Roman Catholics and of their Church. The votaries of this doctrine hold with perfect consistency, that such a right, being one of proper citizenship, may be enforced by the sword. Nor is this a mere opinion of the schools. Neither is it a tradition which, having once lived, is now dead. In 1848, the people of the Papal

State overthrew the sacerdotal government, constituted themselves into a Republic, and evinced every disposition to keep the peace, and to respect the rights of neighbours. But the swords of four States were at once drawn upon them. France, Austria, Spain, and the Kingdom of Naples, upon the preposterous plea of being invested, as Catholic nations, with a title to dispose of the civil interests of several millions of men, put down the free State in 1849. The operations of Naples and of Spain were feeble and insignificant. The interventions of Austria, due in great part to her false position as the mistress of Lombardy and Venetia, reached their final term many years ago, and nothing can be more unlikely than their renewal. But France, which had no territorial interest to defend, and which is supposed to be rather more exempt than any country in Europe from the weaknesses not only of enthusiasm, but of belief, maintained by sheer force the Papal throne until the exigencies of the German crisis compelled her in 1870 to evacuate Cività Vecchia. May she not, or can she not, ever do this again? A question of vast and profound interest to Europe, and one of those questions, to the cry of which England cannot altogether shut her ears.

Certain it is that France can never perform the same operation with the same ease, as in 1849. At that time Italy had no friend among the nations, except England. Even in England, sentiment was far from being united. The Conservative party, even as it was represented in its most liberal members, such as Lord Aberdeen, was opposed to the popular sentiment of Italy; and to this division it may have been owing that Lord Palmerston, who sympathized warmly with that sentiment, and refused to admit the doctrine that England had, as a Protestant Power, no title to act in the matter, nevertheless confined himself to contending that the Papal Government should, upon its restoration, be reformed, and the spiritual authority severed from the powers and institutions of the State. Russia had the spectre of Poland in her eye, and was associated in all European questions with the anti-popular and anti-national cause. Prussia, at that time, considered herself to be so bound by German sympathies, as to hold that the possession of the Quadrilateral by the Emperor of Austria was a German interest. It was therefore easy for France to subjugate by sheer force the Roman people; and, at the price of this unwarrantable act,

1 Phillimore's International Law, vol. ii. p. 501.

2

2 The name, now happily almost forgotten, was given to the four fortresses of Mantua, Verona, Peschiera, and Legnago.