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I can give you, I think, a truthful and satisfactory account of the work at home. We are going forward and overcoming many a prejudice. And may God grant that the Evangelical Alliance may put fresh courage into every worker here, and we shall go back to our own country to tell of the wonderful things God is doing, and may we not be ashamed to say that we are his servants! And, as I said before, "Them that honor me," (we claim that promise,) "I will honor." May God grant that he will allow each one of us to be his followers!

STATE OF RELIGION IN ITALY.

BY REV. COMM. MATTEO PROCHET, D.D., OF Rome.

"WE Italians owe to the Curia Romana [papacy] our being a nation of infidels." So said Macchiavelli and Guicciardini, the two great writers and thinkers of whom Florence, their birthplace, is justly proud. This severe and scorching sentence has been quoted times without number by Roman Catholic authors and journalists, and in late years by hundreds of those who have been engaged in the work of evangelization of the Peninsula. have done so myself in the first period of my ministry, but now, after thirty years' work and mixing with all classes of my fellowcountrymen and a closer study of the people, I could not repeat it without restriction and explanation. That the Curia Romana bears an awful responsibility for the sad state into which religion has fallen in Italy there is no doubt. From Dante, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, to Bonghi, Mariano, and other thinkers of our day, a long, uninterrupted sequel of writers have said and say so. Few, however, have looked at the other side of the question, i.e., at the influence of the people on the Curia Romana (papacy). Audi alteram partem is a maxim the justice of which appears obvious to any unprejudiced mind. Some one has said "a people has the government it deserves." I do believe it; history of the past ages proves it. May we not say also that, to a certain extent, a people has the religion it deserves? Could the Church of Rome have acquired the power it has so long possessed, transformed the religion of Christ into a caricature of it, if it had not found a favorable ground for it? Would the Church of Rome have become what it is if, instead of Rome, it had had Berlin, London, or Edinburgh as its head centre? I have no hesitation to answer, No. To be just, impartial, let us admit that there has been action and reaction. Little by little the church departed from the pure, simple, and grand teaching of Christ, added to it, changed it, and come to the point of being in flat contradiction.

with it. And the people? The people submitted to the change, nay, favored it. We have, it is true, here and there, pious souls who seem to feel instinctively that God, when he gave his Son to the world, wanted something else than the Christianity such as it had become. But they are few and far between, and their protestations are lost in the enthusiastic or indifferent acquiescence of the masses. I said "instinctively" for want of a term that would express thoroughly my idea. St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, and kindred minds and souls felt that the church, as it was in their times, did not reflect the love of God to poor perishing sinners, the compassion of Christ toward the sufferers, but they did not see the real cause of the discrepancy; they seemed not to suspect that the reason lay in the teaching which was no longer the teaching of the pure gospel. Their efforts were concentrated upon one point, to bring back the church to the "rich poverty" of the primitive Christians. Hence the foundation of stricter monastic rules with the vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty; hence the failure of all those efforts to infuse into the church the spiritual life which was ebbing out.

But, to understand better the present state of things, we must go farther back than the twelfth and the thirteenth century. We must remember what had taken place in Europe when Constantine the Great, for the reasons we know, declared himself a Christian, when to be a Christian involved no longer the possibility of a cruel death; when, on the contrary, it led to the enjoyment of imperial favors, when there enlisted under the banner of Christ thousands and millions whose hearts did not love him, whose minds had no conception of his doctrines. In one word, to a great extent, and for too many, alas! a varnish of Christianity covered the paganism which was never entirely destroyed in Italy. Time does not permit to enter into details, nor to consider how far that might be said of other nations. I must confine myself strictly to my subject. I have no hesitation to give as my deep conviction, and as the only possible explanation, to my mind, of the religious condition of Italians, the belief that paganism was never totally killed. It remained under multifarious forms, as the heathen nations of Caanan remained with God's people, to be a snare to it, and a cause of its fall and ruin. More, or worse still, pagan customs, rites, superstitions, remained, mixed up with the Christian idea, and adulterated it. Where there was a real conversion of the

heart, this remnant of paganism was swallowed up and rendered harmless, just as some poisons have no deadly influence upon strong constitutions; but where the conversion did not take place, Christian principles and maxims were injured to the extinction of real Christian life. This may sound like the prejudiced opinion of a man in whose veins runs the blood of his fathers, who for a thousand years resisted Romish influence. Let us then hear a Roman Catholic writer who, in 1891, printed the following words in his "Italia Mistica e Italia Pagana": "The old gods of heathendom have never totally departed from our soil, from the temples, the houses, and the hearts of Italians. A large portion of Italy, and especially the southern, may be truly said never to have ceased to be pagan." (Barzellotti, page 650.) Cicero states that the statues of the gods show their magic power only in times of war. What do we read in the Christian era? During a war a Madonna of Treviglio was covered with perspiration and wept; one in Milan stretched out her arms; another in Arezzo changed her color; during the political disturbances of the end of the last century, almost all the Madonnas of Rome took to rolling their eyes, weeping and turning pale. Six and twenty cases were declared duly proved by the Vatican! Words and names have changed, but the conceptions of the people are to-day what they were two thousand years ago, and it may be said, speaking in a general way, that "wherever an ancient temple stood, a Christian. saint has stepped in; " so, where Poseidon was worshipped in Greece and southern Italy, St. Nicola took his place the name is changed, but the image is the same, as is the worship. The Calabrian girls go to St. Venera to obtain a husband; the Neapolitan women go to St. Ann, and the Romans to the Madonna of St. Agostino, for the same purpose for which those we now call heathens went to Juno, Lucina, and so on. The ancient idea of a "foreign god" has come down through the ages. The Neapolitans have not much confidence in St. Elia (brought to them from Greece by Carmelite monks); they say, speaking of him, "he is forestiero"-stranger. These few examples, taken out of thousands, will suffice as illustrations of Barzellotti's bold and striking assertion.

When the Reformation came, like a mighty wind it shook the Roman Catholic Colossus to its very foundations. Italy had its share. No Luther, no Calvin, no Knox to move the people with

their powerful, fiery eloquence, and yet the Reformation doctrine found acceptance in many cities and in Rome itself. Perhaps the humble but persevering work of the Waldenses had its share in the preparation of the ground. Professors, monks from the pulpit or the chair attracted the attention of students and people; among them, Celio Curione, Pietro Martire Vermigli, Aonio Paleario, and scores of others; even cardinals, such as Contarini and Sadoleto, were favorable to the Reformation. How is it that in less than fifty years all the voices that proclaimed gospel truth were hushed to silence, and that in a small corner alone of the peninsula trembling hearts continued to worship God in spirit and in truth? The counter-reformation had taken place; the Inquisition and the Jesuits had joined their efforts to uphold the tottering edifice of the papacy; victims had fallen by thousands, and other thousands had sought refuge in more favored lands, the Reformation had been stifled in blood. The Church of Rome had its large share of responsibility, there is no doubt, but no unprejudiced and illuminated mind could ascribe to the Inquisition alone, and to its bloody exploits, the merit or the sin to have crushed once more and for other centuries the consciences which seemed to awake to new and nobler conceptions of their rights. Alas! the people, the mass of the people, were not touched by the Reformation. Were it not for the Inquisition and the Jesuits, the Reformation would have taken root in Italy; in the course of time a large proportion of the population would have enlisted under its banner. But when the persecutions came they found the good seed had fallen in stony ground and had but little root, and it was burnt. Why? was it deeper love to the Romish Church which kept Italians within its folds, whilst the majority of the northern nations separated from it? History would give a flat denial to any one venturing to suggest such a thought. All the other European nations put together cannot offer such a number of men who have written freely about Rome, who have lashed the corruption and tyranny with such burning words, from Dante downwards. The awe which cowed other nations before the pope never swayed Italians in like manner. A single instance to prove it: Hardly a century had elapsed since the German emperor, struck by the papal excommunication, had to come to Canossa and put his neck under the very foot of Gregory VII., when Arnaldo da Brescia began his

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