and funeral wailing need the darkness and silence of the night heavens.

The country, too, is old; it is full of hoary reminiscences, reaching beyond the time of the Romans; the line between. fable and history is ill defined. The country is most perfectly fitted to a religion which clings tenaciously to the past, which has an immutable faith, and which, instead of relying on reason, independent judgment, and a thorough private study of the Bible, has appealed to the sentiment, to the fancy and the outward sense. In short, it is a religion which has seized on every advantage furnished by its locality, adroitly turning the laws of nature to its own benefit.

2. The Romish system in Italy relies in a measure on its antiquity. It has existed almost from the Apostolic age. The great sects of Protestantism seem but children of yesterday. This Church says her masses at altars built or begun before the time of Constantine. It has placed its great symbol in the Flavian amphitheatre, commenced by Vespasian. It has charge of those solemn subterranean chapels, on whose dark walls is carved the palm-branch of the martyrs.* Her litanies were chanted by Ambrose and Augustine. On the stones of her Appian Way, as they now lie, Apostles and Evangelists walked.

This appeal to antiquity derives its support from several sources. It has its foundation in the nature of man, in one of his primary and strongest tendencies. We naturally reverence what is old. We cling to by-gone days. Amid the shifting scenes of the present and the uncertainties of

* Both the crown and palm-branch are borrowed from Paganism; but they received additional significance to the Christian from the mention of them in the book of Revelation. - Maitland's Church in the Catacombs, p. 177.

the future, we fondly disentomb the long-buried past. The feeling is not confined to one class of men. The illiterate and the learned alike share in it. Respect for the aged is the marked characteristic of the whole Oriental world. The removal of ancient landmarks has been guarded by heavy imprecations. An old Bible, the heirloom of several generations, is often the most precious family treasure. Of this vital and universal attribute of man, the Italian Church avails herself to the utmost. Mighty empires have disappeared; she remains. The palaces of the Cæsars have crumbled long ago; the Apostolic faith still lives in its primeval bloom, attracting fresh veneration, greeted with a more passionate love, as ages pass away.

Again, she has adroitly strengthened this sentiment, by appealing to the abuse and perversion of the opposite. Innovation is sometimes followed by bitter fruits, often so at first, when the ultimate effect may be beneficial. A popular revolution ends in despotism, freedom of speech in licentiousness, freedom of thinking in heartless infidelity. Reform is only the cloak under which some discontented spirits hide their ambitious designs. Democracy in Church and State is only another name for anarchy. Every unsuccessful experiment of this nature, and history is full of them, has been eagerly seized by this conservative Church, and turned to the utmost practical account. Not a little of her power is traceable to this source. She has selected with a sagacious eye, and with a far-reaching policy, the most disastrous events in Protestant history, the most melancholy facts in the annals of perverted reason. How much better, she has proudly asked, is the boasted country of Martin Luther, iron-bound by a godless rationalism, than what men call ignorant and superstitious Italy? Which is to be pre

ferred, the order-loving and tolerant cantons in Catholic Switzerland, with a few peaceable, Jesuit schoolmasters, or those democratic Protestant districts where a portion of the people at this moment cannot celebrate the Lord's Supper but at the peril of life?

Another source of this influence is the mellowing effect of time. The evil that men do is buried with them; the good lives, and is evermore hallowed. Errors and weaknesses disappear behind the dusky veil of time; good and great actions stand out in the boldest relief. Critically to analyze the character of the men whom we idolize, would be like desecrating the tomb of a father. Hence there prevails an idea of the faultless character of the piety of the primitive Church, which has no foundation in reality. Hence the Italian Catholic looks only on the great illuminated points in the history of his Church, passing over the valleys covered with darkness, the marshes stagnant and redolent with all corruption. To his eye, his mother Church in her long, bright history seems like the queen of Oriental cities, sitting on the shore of the narrow sea in paradisiacal beauty. We listen to some of the Ambrosian chants or the mediæval hymns, sung in a temple moss-grown through seven hundred years; the words have an indescribable tenderness, an unearthly solemnity, as they float among the arches, and linger around the marble columns, and wander along the fretted roof. As the Stabat Mater Dolorosa peals from the organ and from voices without number, we seem to hear those wailing tones and catch the very accents of the holy women who came to see that great sight; and we forget the fatal theological error which lurks in those awful sounds or in those words which embody the very soul of music. No other church has such treasures, because every other is comparatively modern.

3. The Italian Church has been sustained in part by permanent funds, or by a large, fixed capital. We do not refer so much to the religious foundations, monasteries, nunneries, and institutions of the like nature, as to the endowments which support the parish churches, and those which are devoted to the direct extension of Papacy. The former stand on a more precarious tenure, and have often been confiscated or swept away in a revolution. But the capital which has maintained the parochial clergy has been, whatever may be the case in the future, one of the firmest supports of the system. In Tuscany, which has about two thirds of the population of the State of New York, the permanent funds for the maintenance of the regular clergy amount to several millions of dollars. Whatever is not necessary to the support of the priest is scrupulously distributed to the poor.* This provision places the clergy in a position independent in a measure of the people, while it does not diminish their influence over their flocks. What an efficient instrument for the extension of the Catholic faith has been the Congregation de Propaganda Fide at Rome, - an entire street filled with its imposing edifices! Its presses in number, its types in variety of languages, its pupils gathered literally from the four quarters of the earth, are a most striking practical proof that the ubiquity of the Catholic Church is not a mere rhetorical exaggeration. It

* Florence, e. g., is divided into parishes; there is generally in each parish one parish church, besides other churches and chapels; to each church belong benefices more or less, which are in the hands of patrons, rich families, and others; these benefices vary in value from fifty to one hundred or two hundred dollars; there is often great competition for them among the young priests, there being more applicants than places. The candidate must possess a living worth fifty dollars before he can make application. The funds of a church are in the hands of a sacristan.

is sometimes said, that nothing but ardent love to Christ and true faith in His word will sustain a foreign missionary for a series of years in a barbarous and pagan country. Yet the pupils of the Propaganda, and other adherents of this religion, have exhibited in unnumbered instances and through long centuries the most unshaken zeal and the most heroic courage. Either they have been animated by the true Christian spirit, or else the general proposition just referred to is not founded in fact. No isolated efforts, no merely voluntary contributions, could ever accomplish what that celebrated society has done. The order of Jesuits is not an exception. They have been, as is well known, the founders of the most splendid churches, the authors or promoters of the largest permanent foundations belonging to the Catholic hierarchy, themselves in turn supported by these foundations.

St. Peter's church itself may be regarded as a permanent fund, whose value for the Papacy arithmetic can hardly compute. It stands as the noblest representative of the unity of the Catholic faith, in unapproached grandeur by any edifice now standing, or that was ever built by Greek or Roman, and which Michael Angelo said he labored upon for the love of God. This church, by its history, by its associations with the earlier edifice which stood on the same spot, by its faultless proportions, by its effects every year on the thousands who behold it, Protestants and Catholics, the guides of taste and public sentiment in their respective countries, becomes a support to the system which words have no power to delineate, is an investment for that Church immeasurably richer than the marble and the gold which so profusely adorn it.*

* The ancient basilica had existed above one thousand years. The