BRITISH AND FOREIGN EVANGELICAL REVIEW. JANUARY 1866. ART. I.-Rome and the Romans. N the course of last winter, Pio Nono resigned himself with exemplary piety to the disposal of divine providence, refusing, in spite of the efforts of the Emperor of France, to bestir himself for his own defence, notwithstanding the prospect of the withdrawment of the army of occupation. The expostulations of Count de Sarteges received no other reply at the time from the holy father but that his trust was in a higher power. He was even ready, rather than take the sword for his defence, to go forth from the Vatican with his staff in the one hand and his book in the other, and fill up the remainder of his few and evil days with a pilgrimage through Europe, receiving the homage and reviving the faith of his spiritual children. The pontiff's trust has since receded from that high tide mark. Another lingering look at St Peter's has staggered his pilgrim purpose, and once more his spiritual children witness the head of the Church sinking to dependence on an arm of flesh. Even at the highest season of the pontiff's faith, it was whispered in Rome that the enrolment of soldiers was being made in petto, and that the trust in providence was not so absolute as was announced to Count de Sarteges. At all events, the season of romantic submission has passed. Napoleon was not to be deceived by the profession of the pope into a change of his measures; and the pope, baulked in his hopes of the Emperor's conversion, has had recourse once more to arms-to arms for the defence of himself against his Roman subjects. A thousand foreign soldiers were ordered last August to VOL. XV.-NO. LV. A be added to the pontifical army, and a loan of two millions sterling authorised at the same time, for a further levy of three thousand men. As the French soldiers turn their backs on the Flaminian gate, Rome and its people are to be subjected to worse than the old army of occupation-to the mercy of an army of mercenaries, at the command of the fears and suspicions of its priestly paymasters. Guaranteed by the convention of September against foreign aggression, the pope dreads a more formidable enemy, in the foes of his own household; and to perpetuate his rule, is compelled to reveal to Europe by his new muster, that if he would rule at all, he must rule with a rod of iron. If this self-defensive movement be successfully carried out, the pontifical government will doubtless prolong for a season its temporal sovereignty, give respite to Europe from the vexed Roman question, allow the Emperor of France to march his troops out of Rome without the risk of an immediately subsequent revolutionary explosion, and enable him at length to reconcile his own position with his principles of non-intervention. But when all this has become un fait accompli, will the Roman question be nearer a permanent satisfactory solution? The professed aim of the intervention of the Emperor was to preserve Rome for the Papacy. Yet at every step it has opposed itself to his endeavours to bring its acts into harmony with the necessities of its position. With all his influence, Napoleon' has failed during his fifteen years' occupation to obtain one concession from the pontiff in favour of his Roman subjects; and when he leaves Rome, he will leave its people as hostile as when he entered it to the sovereignty of the papacy, and waiting only for their opportunity to strike off its chain. That opportunity may be postponed by the strong hand of the papal mercenaries, but the Romans know that the finances of the papacy are not inexhaustible, and that, if other complications do not bring them relief, their relief will come from the inexorable law to which Rome is no stranger, "No pay no paternoster," or in military phrase, "Point d' argent, point de Swisse." In the discussion of the Roman question by a class of distinguished French writers, the rights of the Roman people are dealt with as the least of its elements. M. de Montalembert has written and spoken of the Roman State, "lo Stato Pontefizio," as the work of the catholic nations, and pronounced the eternal city to be the "spiritual capital of the catholic world." We are not surprised that the eloquent fancy of Montalembert should have thrown around the papacy, as a shield from the assaults of its aggrieved Roman subjects, this splendid generalisation. Guizot's Plea for Temporal Sovereignty of the Pope. 3 He is seldom unwilling to doff his liberal armour when it is to do battle for the pope. But it is singular to find a great protestant statesman of France giving expression to the same theory, and wielding it in arrest of Cavour's projected unification of Italy, and in special protest against the inclusion of Rome and the pontifical states in the Italian kingdom. "If the Catholic Church," wrote Guizot, in 1861, "had been only an Italian church; if catholicism had been confined within the limits of that beautiful country, 'Ch' Apennin parte, e 'l mar circonda, e l' Alpe,' of that land which M. de Cavour undertook to conquer entirely for Piedmont, there would have been some plausible motive, some specious appearance in his language; he would only have touched spiritual order, where he changed temporal order; he would only have attacked religious liberty where he established political unity, and the local church, placed under the law of a new State, would have been the only sufferer by the change. But the Catholic Church is everywhere, without as within Italy; in the old and in the new world; and in every quarter would the abolition of the temporal sovereignty of the pope change its condition and assail its liberties. If M. de Cavour, in the new Italian kingdom, had desired the absolute separation. of Church and State, and the entire religious freedom of Catholicism, in place of its alliance with the civil power, it might have been admitted. I do not ask whether he would have been right or wrong; he would at least have acted within the limits of his political rights and of Italian sovereignty. But to adopt, as regards the Catholic Church, measures which everywhere change its constitution and position; which affect the Catholics of France, Germany, Spain, England, America, and the whole world, together with those of Italy; which disturb the Catholic missionaries in the cities of China, and in the island of Oceania, as well as the ministers and believers in Paris and Madrid; to take from all these churches, nations, and consciences, utterly strangers to the Italian kingdom, the ancient sovereignty, the old securities for the independence of the spiritual head of their religion, is undoubtedly one of the strongest acts of usurpation which history acknowledges or the mind can conceive!" Translated into the political logic of Guizot, the theory of Montalembert amounts to the disfranchisement of Rome and of the pontifical states. It wrests from them the common rights of nations, on the plea that they are in a peculiar position, the occupants of a territory which is the 66 'capital of the Catholic world," and which, affecting the interests of the remotest provinces of Romish Christendom, falls to be governed, not with a view to the special advantage of its own inhabitants, but in subservience to the independence of the papacy, and the glory of its spiritual sovereign. Rome and its citizens are on this theory a sacrifice on the service of Catholic Europe and of the Catholic world; and if, in the fulfilment of this high function, their own political position be not the most enviable, their recompence for their abridged liberty is the honourableness of their position. They preserve the independence of the papacy, and have their reward in the grateful approbation of Catholic Europe! That they should satisfy themselves with this recompence, and take joyfully in consideration of it the spoiling of their liberties, is the doctrine peremptorily laid down for their acceptance by another and no less an authority, than M. Thiers. He even chides them for allowing the thought of their individual interests to come across the path of the august spiritual ruler of the Catholic world. Their part is to recognise the duty of devoting themselves to the independence of the pontiff,-"For," says M. Thiers, in a report to the Legislative Assembly in France, with autocratic decisiveness, "there is no independence for the pontificate but sovereignty. Here is an interest of the highest order, which ought to silence the particular interests of a nation, as in a state the public interests silence individual interests." That the independence of the pontificate has been guarded by the temporal sovereignty, is a position which it were not difficult to assail. A glance at the history of the popes would yield indisputable evidence that the temporal sovereignty, instead of a defence around the papacy, had provoked the ambition of popes, been the source of their unceasing political entanglements, imperilled often their very existence, and proved their continual temptation and snare. Dante said long ago "la Chiesa di Roma But admitting all that is pleaded for the temporal sovereignity, why should Rome and the Roman States, more than any of the other Catholic nations, be sacrificed to its support? or by what right can the Catholic powers of Europe combine to hold a people unwilling to be held under its yoke, and who lack, let it be said, the virtue for M. Thiers's required act of political self-immolation? That the Romans have uttered their strongest protest against that sovereignty needs no new proof. For fifteen years the bayonets of Rome Sacrificed to Romanism. 5 France have been the witnesses of the strength of that protest; and the freshly mustering thousands of papal troops proclaim its still undiminished vitality. If, in the conviction of Catholic Europe, this sovereignty be indispensable to the independence of its spiritual chief, let its Catholic powers impose on him the necessity of ruling on the conditions that can alone give permanence to his rule. Let them insist upon his governing on the recognised principles of constitutional sovereignty, or cease to ask from the citizens of Rome a sacrifice to which no people should consent, and to which submission is given only because resistance were death. The Catholic nations grievously misinterpret the silence of the citizens of Rome, if they accept it for their aquiescence in its pontifical sovereignty. Their silence is the proof of the repressive rigour of its rule, but are they satisfied with a government that is administered by, and exclusively for, a priestly class; that in its dread of its own subjects denies the liberty of meeting to more than six persons in one place without special licence from the police; which treats as a criminal the citizen who ventures an opinion on its acts; which imprisons whom it will on its own suspicions; which refuses public trial to an accused, and the privilege of being confronted with his accusers, and all information as to why and wherefore he has been hurried from his family at midnight and shut up in a dungeon; which moreover allows of no change to its subjects of their religious belief, no utterance of any conviction that differs from its own, without visiting the heretic with penalties, and applying the secular arm in correction of his aberrations; which from the living exacts confession to a priest, and punishes the dying who refuse to confess, by interdicting the attendance of his physician, nullifying his will, and disgracing his family by refusing to his body Christian burial! M. de Montalembert, in his jealousy for the integrity of the papal power, may speak of the Roman state as the work of the Catholic nations, and of the eternal city as the spiritual capital of the Catholic world; but will the Romans consent to be a continual living sacrifice on behalf of the Catholic nations, and submit for ever to be enclosed in whatever pen the shepherds of Europe may choose for them? We have misread the signs of a winter's residence at Rome, if its citizens be not prepared for the decisive assertion of their independence, when the hour shall strike that delivers them from the bayonets of France, or from the overwhelming force of the papal mercenaries. That time is not far distant, let them only patiently wait for it; and when their triumph comes, use it with the moderation that will prove |