Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/72

60 they are glad when the government shows that it is still anxious to effect some kind of agreement between the spiritual and civil powers, and though they have probably not much hope of this being accomplished during the reign of Pius IX., they find satisfaction in the belief that the government is as much alive as they are to the importance of not irritating the bishops or clergy into making common cause with the pope. There are moments when under Radical pressure an Italian minister will seem to forget this class of persons altogether, and to be bent upon satisfying the class which hates the pope as cordially as the pope hates a Freemason or an Old Catholic, and would like, if it had the power, to deal with him in an equally summary fashion. But this disposition is never lasting; it has its root in the momentary needs of political strategy, and when these are satisfied the motives which permanently determine the ecclesiastical policy of the government regain their sway.

If the moderate section of the Italian laity is anxious to keep on good terms with the Church, we may be sure that the moderate section of the Italian priesthood is equally though less openly anxious to keep on good terms with the government. The points upon which the pope has quarrelled with the king of Italy are not really of a kind to interest the inferior clergy. The overthrow of the temporal power has made but little change in their worldly condition; the secularization of the property of the religious orders has gratified the concealed but immemorial dislike of the secular to the regular clergy; and, though those of them who have been in the habit of visiting Rome may regret the suspension of the ecclesiastical pomp which made the Church so glorious in the eyes even of unbelievers, they are probably aware that the pope's imprisonment is self-inflicted, and that if he were willing to show himself once more in St. Peter's, it is not the Italian government that would wish to prevent him. Nor is it among the inferior clergy only that the existence of these and similar views may be suspected. The Italian cardinals must have lost the traditional acuteness of their race and order if their opinions on the relations of the Catholic Church with the civil power have not been modified by the recent action of the Prussian government. When Cavour gave expression to the formula, "a free Church in a free State," the Roman court compared the state of things which it described with a state of things which they undoubtedly liked very much better. They were familiar with a free Church in an obedient State, with a Church which had everything her own way in a State which in ecclesiastical matters was willing — for a consideration — to do the Church's bidding. All their theories of the necessary and indissoluble union of Church and State were based upon this experience, and Cavour's maxim conveyed nothing to their minds but the emancipation of the State from the salutary control which they had previously exercised over it. Prince Bismarck has introduced them to the other side of the shield. He has proved by example that there is a form of union between Church and State which is infinitely more irksome to the Church than total separation — a union of which the outward and visible symbols are fines, imprisonment, and sequestrations. As compared with the state of things now existing in Prussia, the Italian modus vivendi must seem positively attractive. If Victor Emmanuel is not exactly a nursing-father to the Church, he is not the taskmaster that the Emperor William is. The fact that there is a strong anti-clerical minority in Italy may strengthen these dispositions among the higher clergy, because it may protect them against that temptation to grasp at too much which has involved them in so many disasters. If the Italian people were all of one mind in this matter, the cardinals might still dream of upsetting the political settlement of Italy. In the presence of a compact Radical section in the Chamber and in the country, to attempt this would be to court inevitable defeat, a defeat which might extend far beyond the points involved in the particular conflict.

There is no need to refer to those features in Victor Emmanuel's character which are likely more and more to dispose him to make his peace with the Church. His temper, even at the times when it has been most distinctively Italian and anti-Papal, has never been in the least Protestant or even anti-Ultramontane. If the pope would leave him in undisputed possession of his dominions, he would probably submit with perfect readiness to any purely spiritual claims which the Church might choose to put forward. He is not subject to intellectual doubts, and has never been in the least troubled by the Vatican or any other decrees. Putting politics aside, he 