ave no religion, and
we have set up a negation in its place.

II.

On the one side we have--as our only form and semblance of religion--the
Papacy.

I remember to have written, more than thirty years ago, when none other
dared openly to venture on the problem,--when the boldest contented
themselves with whispering of reforms in Church discipline, and those
writers who, like Gioberti, set themselves up as philosophers, thought
proper, as a matter of tactics, to caress the Utopia of an Italian
primacy, intrusted to I know not what impossible revival of
Catholicism,--I remember to have written then that both the Papacy and
Catholicism were things extinct, and that their death was a consequence
of _quite another death_.

I spoke of the dogma which was the foundation of both.

Years have confirmed what I then declared. The Papacy is now a corpse
beyond all power of galvanization. It is the lying mockery of a
religion,--a source of perennial corruption and immorality among the
nations, and most fatally such to our own, upon whose very soul weighs
the incubus and example of that lie. But at the present day we either
know or ought to know the cause of this.

All contact with the Papacy is contact with death, carrying the taint of
its corruption over rising Italy, and educating her masses in
falsehood,--not because cardinals, bishops, and monks traded in
indulgences three centuries ago,--not because this or that Pope
trafficked in cowardly concessions to princes, or in the matrimony of
his own bastards with the bastards of dukes, petty tyrants, or kings, in
order to obtain some patch of territory or temporal dominion,--not
because they have governed and persecuted men according to their
arbitrary will; but because they _cannot_ do other, even if they would.

These evils and these sins are not _causes_, but _consequences_.

Even admitting the impossible hypothesis that the guilty individuals
should be converted;--that the Jansenists, or other Reformers, should
recall the misguided Popes to the charity and humility of their ancient
way of life,--they could only cause the Papacy to die with greater
dignity;--it can never again be what once it was, the ruler and director
of the conscience of the peoples.

The mission of the Papacy--a great and holy mission, whatever the
fanatics of rebellion at the present day, falsifying history and
calumniating the soul and mind of humanity in the past, may say to the
contrary--is fu