Page:Rome and the Revolution - Manning.djvu/18

Rh graceful and most grotesque of creatures, and affirms that thought is phosphorus, the soul a name for the complex of nerves, and, if I rightly understand its mysteries, that our moral sense is a secretion of sugar. From want of light my exposition may be heterodox, but of one thing I am certain, that this religion of God is founded in the denial and destruction of Christianity and the Vicar of Christ. But in all this there is nothing new. It is the same stupidity of unbelief, the same persecuting bigotry of the infidel revolution, which from age to age has periodically tormented the Christian world. This same delirious impiety was preached more than half a century ago, only it was then not by an Italian, but by a Frenchman. France was then the 'first of nations' which was to send forth its spirit and to renew the face of the earth. Now it is Italy. Only the other day I read a rhapsody on the mission of Italy among the nations. It was the utterance of the prophet of the Italian revolution. Italy is to teach the nations how to live, by abolishing Christianity. Let us hear, then, how this Gospel was preached some seventy years ago. In the Moniteur of June 1793, appeared certain letters of ghostly counsel to the Pope. The admonitions begin as follows:—'You, Holy Father, who trample under foot the ashes of the Camilluses and the Cincinnatuses; you who gravely play your ridiculous farces on the superb theatre where the Scipios and the Paulus Æmiliuses dragged in triumph kings bound to their chariots, do you really think that liberty is so easily snatched from a people ardent to preserve it? The