nd came
with recommendations to me. Protestant worship was forbidden within
the walls of Rome, but to induce the English Protestants to come to
Rome and spend their money there, they were allowed to worship in a
sort of warehouse outside the Porta del Popolo. This was repugnant
to our democratic ways, and the new chaplain insisted on having his
chapel inside the walls. So I "put on cheek" and hired in the name
of the legation an apartment with a huge reception room close to the
Piazza di Spagna, put up the arms of the United States of America,
and opened the reception room for public worship as the chapel of the
legation,--the first instance in recorded time of Protestant worship
in the Papal city. The sequel was amusing, for as Sunday was my only
holiday, and I always spent it on the Campagna, the chaplain cut me
dead for not attending his services and keeping Sunday.

I expected some admonitory allusion to this achievement when next
I saw the Pope, but no notice was ever taken of it either by the
superior or the lower authorities, and so far as I know the church of
my planting flourished as long as the city remained under the Papal
rule, but with no more of my watering. The Pope was, I am persuaded,
quite indifferent to it, for, devout and unquestioning believer in
his own divine authority as he was, he was not a bigot, and not of
a persecuting disposition, but he was only a part of an immense and
intricate machine, over the movements of which neither he nor any
other Pope could have much control. He had every possible disposition
to be that ideal ruler, a benevolent despot, but even in that little
realm the details of government were impossible of control by the most
competent head of a government; they were necessarily left to the
incompetent, bigoted, and zealous administrators chosen by the
secondary chiefs of the departments, all the most conservative of men,
with a reverence for the abuses and usages of the old regime. It was
personal government down to the lowest grade of responsibility. The
Pope presided and bore the responsibility of the proceedings, but
Antonelli was the real ruler of the States of the Church.

And Antonelli was the very impersonation of unscrupulous and malignant
intellect, subtle with all the Italian subtlety, and unscrupulous as
any of the brigands from the community in which he had his origin. He
was in those days a cardinal of the order of deacons, and only in his
later career a pries