become eliminated partly
through the republican and imperial wars, and partly through the slave
system. The degenerated half-breeds, of whom the Peninsula was full
through repeated northern immigrations, degenerated, as time went on,
still more and more. After that blood admixture had for the most part
ceased, it took a long time for the base ethnical element which was its
product to come into physiological correspondence with the country, for
the adaptation of man to a new climate is a slow, a secular change.

But blood-degeneration implies thought-degeneration. It is nothing more
than might be expected that, in this mongrel race, customs, and
language, and even names should change--that rivers, and towns, and men
should receive new appellations. As the great statesman to whom I have
referred observes, Caesar and Pompey had disappeared; John, Matthew, and
Peter had come in their stead. Barbarized names are the outward and
visible signs of barbarized ideas. Those early bishops of Rome whose
dignified acts have commanded our respect, were men of Roman blood, and
animated with sentiments that were truly Latin; but the succeeding
pontiffs, whose lives were so infamous and thoughts so base, were
engendered of half-breeds. Nor was it until the Italian population had
re-established itself in a physiological relation with the country--not
until it had passed through the earlier stages of national life--that
manly thoughts and true conceptions could be regained.

Ideas and dogmas that would not have been tolerated for an instant in
the old, pure, homogeneous Roman race, found acceptance in this
adulterated, festering mass. This was the true cause of the increasing
debasement of Latin Christianity. Whoever will take the trouble of
constructing a chart of the religious conceptions as they successively
struggled into light, will see how close was their connexion with the
physiological state of the Italian ethnical element at the moment.
[Sidenote: Successive steps in the religious decline.] It is a sad and
humiliating succession. Mariolatry; the invocation of saints; the
supreme value of virginity; the working of miracles by relics; the
satisfaction of moral crimes by gifts of money or goods to the clergy;
the worship of images; Purgatory; the sale of benefices;
transubstantiation, or the making of God by the priest; the
materialization of God--that He has eyes, feet, hands, toes; the virtue
of pilgrimages; vicarious religion, th