THE ENGLISH

PRESBYTERIAN MESSENGER.

Original Papers.

ROME IN 1851.

(Continued from page 37.)

WHILST holding intercourse with the Romans, the question often arose, "Whence this sudden change in the character of a people who have grown up under the influence of a system so demoralizing, and so opposed to the free exercise of all that tends to invigorate and exalt man's nature?" It seemed as though we had found bright flowers blooming under a upas-tree. Everything bore witness to the impulse which the people had received from the new circumstances in which they had been placed, and showed what they might become under such free institutions as those which Britons enjoy. It was only necessary, however, to come across the priests themselves, or to speak with their satellites, to see the converse of the picture, and to be kept right in forming an estimate as to the sources of the change. They are crafty, indolent, and cringing as ever. The brief breathing-time during which liberty was granted to Rome, when light shone full upon the Italian mind, and saw it rush up into life and vigour, only added deeper darkness to the night of the priestly crew who followed Pius in disguise to Naples. Nor should we leave out of our reckoning the effect of suffering, in disciplining, strengthening, and developing the human mind.

The petty cruelties in the administration of the vengeance of the Italian Governments is very galling to their subjects, and cannot fail to keep a rankling hatred alive in their hearts. Among these are the unhealthy situations of the prisons; bad food; a pestilential atmosphere, caused by cooping up six men where two have hardly room or air; the heartless assortment of the prisoners, shutting in refined and well-educated men with assassins and thieves; and in Rome taking from under them the very beds which their friends had provided, as was done last winter, and leaving them to sleep by turns on the cold stone. A Romish priest estimated the numbers of the prisoners in the States of the Church at more than thirty thousand.

VOL. IV.

In passing under the windows of the numerous prisons, they were seen crowded with the anxious faces of young men, eagerly catching a few mouthsful of fresh air through the grating. The heat was oppressive enough to those who could use every means to escape it; what must it have been in a Roman cell? It was not uncommon to see a cart guarded by sentinels slowly emerging from the iron gates, carrying away many of the hapless inmates to the country prisons, to make room for fresh arrivals. When sentenced to a long period of confinement, they are not allowed to remain in Rome, nor indeed in any of the district prisons near which their offences have been committed, but are sent off to a convenient distance, unknown to their friends, where they may pine away and die of malaria, or otherwise suffer according to the pleasure of the Cardinals. On inquiring of the French soldiers, who seemed to feel their own degrading position, whether the numerous daily committals were for murder and theft, the invariable answer was, "Ah! principalement pour les choses politiques."

Admission to the Civita Vecchia prison, to which an interest is attached, from the notice of it in Fowell Buxton's Life, is no longer granted, but we could minutely survey it from the walks around, which command a view of the court. Gasperoni, who was its most noted inmate when we had visited it some years ago, was no longer there. It was literally packed with fierce-looking men, in the forbidding, brown and white, zebra-striped prison uniform, trying to take a little exercise as well as their chains and the crowded state of the yard would allow. Here the same answer was given to our inquiries at the French soldiers, "chiefly for political offences." "For being good Republicans?" one of our party rejoined. The Frenchman gave a significant shrug and looked away.

No wonder if next Revolution see more than the Cardinals' hats thrown into the Tiber, and more than the carriages of their Eminences crackle in the flames. The Pope will have himself to thank if the keys and the tiara perish too. The Romans must be tempted sometimes to think that they were but too merciful when their tyrants were, so to speak, in their power. It must be hard for a man to stand by the Propaganda gate, or by the entrances to the Vatican and Quirinal, and see the Cardinals' retinues and equipages waiting in long line till their owners have determined on some new refinement of cruelty, or given new warrants for the seizure of suspected victims;-it must be hard to see father, brother, friend hurried off to the Inquisition, and not to wish that the arm had been less sparing when it was free.

It is evident that the Republican form of government is dear to the Romans, and what else could be expected? With the French Revolution of 1848 British freemen cannot sympathize; but compared with the Revolution at Rome it was causeless, and originating with that class who have nothing to lose by riot, annihilation of rank, and community of goods. In Rome it was not so. Gladly would the Romans have stopped where the Piedmontese were satisfied, and accepted a constitutional government, recognising Pius as king and bishop too. Neither was it till after they had repeatedly invited him back from Gaeta, as a constitutional Prince, that they proclaimed their short-lived republic. The new government, maligned as it has been, did not make one false step; and its period of unstained, tranquil rule, in which property was held sacred, every right respected, and the territory daily improved, prepared it for its last Thermopylæan stand. Why did it not also prepare Europe, to aid it against the base act of the

President of France? Never, perhaps, were heroism and coward brute force seen in closer contact, or stranger contrast, than at the siege of Rome. The shepherd bombarding his own flock, the Holy Father cutting down by thousands his own children, and, too weak to do it in person, doing it by the armies of his faithful daughter-republican, dishonoured France. Her lilies never suffered such a blight as when they passed the gates of Rome, nor will the blot which Louis Napoleon has imprinted on her escutcheon be more easily wiped out than the blood-spots it received on St. Bartholomew's day.

It has not been uncommon, even in England, to speak against the helpless Romans, and the mind shrinks from anything like sympathy with anarchy or misrule. But there is a limit to this. Beyond a certain point, refusal of sympathy with the oppressed is sin. Many of the highly-educated and influential in Britain look astonished and incredulous to this hour, when they are told of the ongoings of the Papacy at Rome; and the most that a recital of the barbarities practised on the poor Romans elicits is, "Indeed! we have always understood the Pope to be such an amiable man, it cannot be his fault;" or, "He must be changed, for when we saw him at Gaeta, he was so mild and affable, saying to us, 'An old man's blessing will do you no harm; may you soon return to the true fold!'" The Romans have one open witness in their favour. Excepting the injuries inflicted by the siege itself, and the still current coin stamped Repubblica Romana, the Revolution is traceless.

How naturally might the people have committed some extravagant outrages on the property of Pope and Cardinals, when they first got the uncontrolled use of an arm so long manacled! But no. The chain was lifted off; the wildest natures of Rome and Italy were, by the Pope's account, masters of the city, yet the laws of God and man were respected. The deserted palaces in every street were kept intact; and as for the Principe de Piombino, who remained in his own palace and trusted them, there was not, as a Roman expressed it, a chip upon his marbles, nor a leaf disturbed in his gardens. The persons and property of the French resident in Rome were held strictly inviolate; they did not receive so much as an injurious word during the siege. So much cannot be said for the treatment of the officers and soldiers since they got into the city; numbers of them have fallen a prey to the vengeance of the bereaved wives, sisters, and brides of those who fell in the war; they lured their victims into their empty homes, and threw out their dead bodies into the streets before the morning dawn; this has not yet ceased. As a proof of the people's aversion to their conquerors, an Italian, who had formerly gained a livelihood by teaching the French language to his townsmen, told us that every pupil had withdrawn. All bear testimony to the good behaviour of the French troops, who, when not acting under orders, are kind and civil to the people, notwithstanding the bad eye with which they regard them. Still the executors of such orders as are daily issued from the Quirinal must be detested. The searching of their shops and houses, at all hours and on the slightest pretext, is not the least humbling to the citizens; fire-arms and Bibles are the unlawful articles of search, but the possession of a single tract was, in April last, the cause of a whole family being hurried to prison. The Bible and their freedom have thus become indissolubly associated in their minds by the Pope himself, who has done a reformation-work in Italy of a certain kind, such as he only had the power to do; he has sent Italians in thousands

to read the Word of God, with an eagerness almost approaching to that of awakened souls. This may be believed from the fact that a quantity of seized Bibles were actually presented for sale in the shop of a spy bookseller, that each purchaser's name might be lodged in the hands of the police!

It is delightful while gazing on the classic outline of the seven-hilled city, to think that the boasted title, "Church of Rome," is now rather a taunt than a true name. The idolatries of Antichrist are still perpetrated in the material edifice, but the system is dislodged from the Italian mind and conscience, never to resume its reign. The glittering pageant still winds in gaudy pomp through the streets; but to one who remembers 1849, and who knows how the nation's heart still beats in 1852, it is more like the spectre of a fallen power revisiting its old haunts than one destined long to sway mankind. The existence of the Roman nation had for centuries become so identified with that of the mystical Babylon, that until 1848 the mind never sought to separate them, and even now it seems scarcely possible that the old enchantress of the nations should go down alive into the lake of fire without dragging along with her all that bears her name.

Her

The believer in prophecy visits Rome, therefore, as he visits the ancient dwelling which the architect has sentenced long ago to destruction. palaces, her very fields, her yellow Tiber, seem almost to lie under the same frightful decree as her temples, her altars, and her images. They vividly recal to his mind those youthful days, when, though all the rest of the Apocalypse was like a fairy tale, there was one prophetic fact that rose as a vision of terror clear before his eye. The seven trumpets were then to him but literal trumpets, and the seals material seals; but there was no mistaking what was meant by the city of the seven hills, and no possibility of misinterpreting the swift and terrible judgments that await her. They sunk into his mind along with the strange traditions which the well-worn pages of Eutropius and Cæsar were imprinting there, and as in one of his graver hours he turned from these to the geography of the Italian peninsula, and remembered his last Sabbath's musings on the prophecy of John, he fancied he could see Rome destroyed in an instant by a volcano's breath, or Italy sinking entire into the sea of judgment, while the rest of Europe escaped.

But now who shall say what may be awaiting Rome? Now, when she refuses homage to that very Antichrist; when its anathemas are poured upon her head-when her noblest sons, scorning any more to be its "slaves" in any sense, are rotting in its dungeons or banished from its realm; now, when Italy no longer lays at its feet her "oil and wine," and "marbles," and "precious woods," and "odours;" when some of her children are obeying the call, "Come out of her, my people;"- may not a remnant of the nation yet escape, through God's mighty hand, the doom of the fallen Church? May the old vine planted in Paul's day, and watered by the blood of many martyrs still witnessing from the tombs of the catacombs, not bud forth again?— The Sacred College, at least, is well aware that Italy is no longer to be the sheet-anchor of the Church, and so the new cardinals are chiefly elected from other countries. There is one land to which their chief energies are directed, and from which they begin to fear as much as they hoped a few years ago,—a land to which the Italian captive's eye is also turned. It was deeply affecting to see how much the Romans seemed to hope from England, and the heart sunk to think how little England could

do for them. We heard a noble soldier of the disbanded Legion say, just before our departure from Rome, Speriamo negl' Inglesi; and the same word met us again, re-echoed among the heights of Piedmont, where a simple-minded Vaudois, when speaking of the prospects of Sardinia, in the struggle of nations now at hand, exclaimed,-" After God, we have no hope but England! If she does not save us, our little State must be swallowed up by Austria or France."

Every Englishman, however limited his sphere, can do something for Italy. She is lying helpless in her chains, and individuals cannot go to her rescue; but her banished ones in our own land may be sought out, and made to feel that Britain's open Bible, and Sabbath sanctuary, and warm fireside, as well as her free soil, are all for them, and that she covets, cost her what it may, no higher distinction than to be the exile's home. And if, in days to come, it shall be her lot to encounter the frown of European despotism in league, to hear its angry menaces, or to meet its fury almost single-handed, countless remembrancers will plead her cause with Heaven on the Italian shore, and she will be strong in the omnipotence of Him who is the shield of the oppressed-the stranger's God.

THE ANCIENT CHURCH AND THE MODERN.

HIGH Churchmen are accustomed to say of Nonconformists, that they ignore all between the first century and the sixteenth, all between Paul and Luther. There is some truth in this assertion. The ages which elapsed between the ending of inspiration and the triumph of Reform have been too much overlooked by non-Episcopal communions. Like many other cases, it has been one of extremes breeding extremes. An excessive respect paid to the ecclesiastical past by High Churchmen has led to that past being undervalued by their opponents. But, like all other instances of one-sidedness, either in opinion or in action, this error has brought evils in its train. It has produced a contempt for, or, at least, an exaggerated indifference to, much which it is neither wise nor safe to overlook. The writings of the Fathers have been left unstudied, and what little was known of them has been learned from one or other of the manuals of Church history, or popular volumes of ecclesiastical controversy which have, in recent times, issued from the press. Church history has thus been rather guessed at than known. The prejudices and errors of some favourite Church historian have been perpetuated in the minds of uninquiring followers. And, perhaps, in the plenitude of unacquaintance with the subject, all Patristical theology has been dismissed as valueless by those who must surely have received it as an axiom, that “ 'Ignorance is the mother of criticism."

And yet one would have thought that the mere extent of centuries thus passed over should have awakened in men's minds a suspicion that it was unwise thus to ignore so thoroughly in the gross. That the Church of Christ should, intellectually or morally, have afforded scarcely anything for upwards of thirteen centuries to repay investigation, is surely the reverse of probable. Surely it is a topic of highest interest to know how Christianity, in its doctrines and institutions-the Gospel in the Churchacted upon the world for so long a time. When inspiration ceased and the apostolic commission terminated in John, the Christian Faith had