nch was his companion. Here, in a
solitude and peace which he remembered with regret in the stormy and
sorrowful years that were to come, he conceived his message and the
mission, in which he believed to the last day of his life.

He resolved to found a new association on broader and simpler lines than
the secret societies of the past, which should aim not only at the
material freeing of Italy from her present bondage, but at her moral and
religious regeneration. To aim at material progress of any kind, without
at the same time aiming at a higher moral progress, seemed to Mazzini
absurd; to attempt to pull down without attempting to build up seemed to
him criminal. Thus he accused the Socialists of substituting the
progress of humanity's kitchen for the progress of humanity. He believed
that Italy, united and redeemed, was destined to shed through the world
the light of a new moral unity, which should end the reign of
Scepticism, triumphant among discordant creeds. Mazzini's religious
belief was the motor of his whole being. The Catholicism in which he was
outwardly brought up never seems to have touched his inner nature; he
went through no spiritual wrench in leaving a faith that was never a
reality to him. The same is true of innumerable young Italians, who,
when they begin to read and study, drift out of their childhood's
religion without a struggle or a regret. But thought and study brought
Mazzini what it rarely brings to these young men--the necessity to find
something in which he could believe. He had not long to seek for a basis
to his creed, because he was one of the men from the prophets of old to
Spinoza, from Spinoza to Gordon, to whom the existence of God is a
matter of experience rather than an object of faith. Starting from this
point, he formed his religion out of what he regarded as its inevitable
deductions. If God existed, his creatures must be intended for
perfection; if this were the Divine scheme, man's one business was to
carry it out. He considered the idea of duty separated from the idea of
God to be illogical. Either the development of human things depended on
a providential law, or it was left to chance and passing circumstance,
and to the dexterity of the man who turned these to most account. God
was the sole source of duty; duty the sole law of life. Mazzini did not
denounce Catholicism or any other religion as false. He saw in it a
stepping-stone to purer comprehension, which would be reache