ies, and as the recognized interpreter of their religious faith.
So long as people remain Roman Catholics, they must remain in allegiance
to the head of their church. They may cease to be Catholics, and no
temporal harm will happen to them; but the awful power remains over
those who continue to abide within the pale of the Church. Of his
spiritual subjects the Pope exacts, as he has exacted for centuries,
absolute and unconditional obedience through his ministers,--one great
hierarchy of priests; the most complete and powerful mechanism our world
has seen for good or evil, built up on the experience of ten centuries,
and generally directed by consummate sagacity and inflexibility
of purpose.

I have nothing here to say against this majestic sovereignty, which is
an institution rather than a religion. Most of the purely religious
dogmas which it defends and enforces are equally the dogmas of a
majority of the Protestant churches, founded on the teachings of Christ
and his apostles. The doctrines of Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas,
the great authorities of the Catholic Church, were substantially
embraced by Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, and the Westminster divines. The
Protestants rebelled mainly against the usurpations and corruptions of
the Catholic Church as an institution, not against the creed of the
Fathers and schoolmen and theological doctors in all Catholic countries.
The Nicene and Apostles' creeds bind together all orthodox Christians,
whether of the Roman or Greek or Protestant churches.

Thus, in speaking of the liberation and unity of Italy as effected by an
illustrious band of patriots, aided by friendly powers and fortunate
circumstances, I mean freedom in a political sense. The papal yoke, so
far as it was a yoke, was broken only in a temporal point of view. The
Pope lost only his dominions as a temporal sovereign,--nothing of his
dignity as an ecclesiastical monarch; and we are to consider his
opposition to Victor Emmanuel and other liberators chiefly as that of a
temporal prince, like Ferdinand of Naples. The great Italian revolution
which established the sovereignty of the King of Sardinia over the whole
peninsula was purely a political movement. Religious ideas had little or
nothing to do with it. Communists and infidels may have fought under the
standards of Mazzini and Garibaldi, but only to gain political
privileges and rights. Italy remained after the revolution, as before, a
Catholic country.

I