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Rh an enemy of religion. Nothing in his whole life could justify a suspicion of the sincerity of his Christian end, or lead us to imagine that he would make any retractation. The writings of Gioberti show how bitter a hatred of the clergy may, in Catholic countries, coexist with an earnest faith. Such sentiments, in the years that preceded the Reformation, were common among men who recoiled with horror from the heresy of Luther. In the mind of an ambitious and keen-sighted statesman, inspired with the ideas and with the knowledge of his own age only, and aware of its aspirations and feelings ; who finds that in all great questions of secular interest which he knows that he understands he is opposed by almost all the priesthood, and supported by the ablest men out of the Church ; who has been accustomed from his youth to connect the clergy with a system of government which excites his just and honest indignation, — is not necessarily an unbeliever if he cannot distinguish between the party and the cause, and fails to discover the true solution of the great problem in which better men have gone astray. He thought he could reconcile religion and modern society without injury to either, and he was mistaken ; but not more grievously and fatally mistaken than the mass of those by whom he was denounced. His ignorance of religion has been a great calamity, but not a greater calamity than his ignorance of the true nature of liberty. The Church has more to fear from political errors than from religious hatred. In a State really free, passion is impotent against her. In a State without freedom, she is almost as much in danger from her friends as from her enemies. The annexation of all Italy under the Sardinian Crown would not have been, perhaps, so much an evil as a blessing to religion, if the political system of Sardinia had been sound. The incompatibility of the Piedmontese laws and government with the freedom of the Church is the real danger in the loss of the temporal power. If Cavour had been what he believed himself to be, a liberal statesman, the Roman question would have lost much of its complication. A