terior, you are arrested by the towering mass of the Colliseum, which, on inspecting, you find has been converted from an amphitheatre for shows of cruelty and martyrdom, into a Calvary, with a dozen or more little chapels; the Pantheon, open, as it ever was, to the skies, is trodden by Christian priests, ministering at Christian altars; the columns of old Rome, quarried from the rubbish of ages by the orders of popes, are purged from all impiety, and re-erected to the honour of Peter or Paul; the bridges are consecrated by statues of the apostles and saints; the fountains, whither the common people resort, are marked by the same twofold spirit: everything, in short, in Rome is religious, or, if it must be said, receives the marks of religion; so that the one great idea which looks out upon you from every object is Catholicism. What illustrates this fact most characteristically, and shows what license the papacy has granted itself in using alien materials in the service of religion, is the presence of certain basso-relievos of mythology and Roman history upon the very gates of the chief temple, St Peter's, including, in the mythological groups, "Jupiter and Leda," "The Rape of Ganymede," and other devices of an equally edifying description.

In such works, of course, there is nothing religious; but it is easy to see how, even where the original expression of them is profane, or at least pagan, the employment of them, either for religious uses, or as trophies of religion, springs essentially out of the Christian instinct; and, were the seals of the papacy, as distinguished from spiritual Romanism (Christianity of the Roman, or, let us say, the Italian type), not so distinctly visible in the appropriation of these works to Christian purposes, they would, with a few exceptions (such as the above-mentioned illustrations on the doors of the papal temple), be important auxiliaries to the faith; for, as they are, they strengthen the papacy, by associating in people's minds the papal hierarchy with the most remarkable monuments of the triumphs of the Christian religion. Confused and unintelligent, indeed, is the popular feeling on the subject; but things seen always in conjunction become soon identified; even where scepticism has entered the soul, with respect to the papal claims, these are admitted in words, or at least acquiesced in, for the sake of that spiritual reality, in evidence of which these columns, arches, and temples of pagan idolatry, are extant witnesses.

The paintings, however, of the Vatican, it is needless to say-the immortal works of Fra Angelico, Raphael, and Angelo-are the results of art on which the modern papacy has with most reason dwelt complacently; but, except in their forms, they are less Romish than any work, either of poetry or art, which Protestantism itself has ever produced. The spirit and primary impression of them-we say it in no freak of paradox-are subversive of Popery, and contain, indeed, the purest expression of the Gospel and the Gospel Church, which any age since apostolic times has attempted to embody in an independent form. In connection with this fact, and illustrative of it, the pictures of Raphael and the other Christian masters have called forth none of the usual zeal of the partisans or opponents of the papacy; probably, because neither of the great sections of the Christian Church has felt a right to appropriate them to itself; both have been scared off from controversy on this sacred neutral ground: the bigotry of the one class, and the bareness of

the other, being equally abashed in presence of the serene catholicity which is the triumph only of universal insight. Oliver Cromwell, at once the sternest and most spiritual of practical Protestants, could, in the keen feeling with which he detected truth and falsehood under every conventional disguise, preserve for the nation what Charles L. could purchase for his own religious support the cartoons of Hampton Court. Raphael, we venture to say, is associated with Romish faith in scarcely any mind in this country; his works circulate freely among us in copy, and are viewed by no Christian eye without tender and exulting emotion.

In an incomparably more limited sphere, and for freedom from conventionality not to be mentioned with Raphael, Fra Angelico might yet be cited as an example of this Gospel art, still more remarkable even than the pet of Julius II., and the idol of the troops of pupils which compassed his steps wherever he went. Less known, because more Romish in form, and certainly of limited invention, Fra Angelico is yet by far the most saintly of the Italian artists. Himself a man of the most rigid sanctity, the heads of his paintings are, for sweetness, purity, and heavenly-mindedness in expression, though associated with monastic life, positively overpowering in effect. The spectator, beholding them, feels as if the saints of Abraham's bosom had taken their "spiritual bodies," and come down to tabernacle among men; and this notwithstanding the bad odour in which he may hold the sisterhoods and fraternities to which the figures are assumed to belong. Popery, as distinguished from Romanism, or, as we shall see, the radical characteristics of Roman Christianity, finds only an incidental support in works of such stainless purity. Even in Raphael's famous "Miracle of Bolsena," representing a priest doubting the real presence, and, as he performs mass, seeing blood trickle from the consecrated wafer, the instinct of Raphael has survived the conditions under which he had to work: pope, priest, and worshippers, are at least sincere, and, whether you accept or reject the dogma, you derive the same impression-that "nothing is impossible with God," and that, indeed, "He is a spirit, and must be worshipped in spirit and in truth." The innumerable Maries, too, painted by this artist, betoken the same primary reverence for the idea, and the subordination of the circumstance; so that popery, in his works (and the remark is applicable, with explanation, to the best works of all the great Christian painters), is but an appendage: the form is only a foil to the spirit; the popish body, to the Christian soul which is no part of it. If we began with the "Sposalizio of the Virgin," the most spiritual vision of the rite ever fixed on canvass, and, passing through the intermediate period of the Stanze and Loggia, arrived at the tapestries of the Vatican, we should find, from first to last, materials to verify the observation.

Still, it would be too much to expect of Romanists, that they would explicitly acquiesce in the doctrine of these statements, or, what is quite as difficult, recognise to themselves that the Christianity and the Popery of the Catholic artists, in their works, are strictly apportioned in the manner indicated. The mind easily passes from the substance to the form, and transfers the homage really paid to the one externally to the other. Consequently, however startling the history of the papacy is to

every religious mind, and with whatever measure of scorn and abhorrence the proceedings of the sacred college were viewed by the republicans of the late movement, religion itself, it is scarcely necessary to say, had been too long identified with the existence of a pompous hierarchy, to suggest a deeper remedy in the heart of the papal capital than the separation of the temporal and the spiritual powers. The writer, he is sorry to state, met with nothing, in the course of his Italian travels, to justify the belief, that the revolution was meant to stand for more than the riddance of an odious priesthood from the sphere of political affairs. What this desire, had it succeeded, might have eventually effected for spiritual reformation, it is difficult to say; it cannot be doubted, however, that, out of a successful movement for temporal freedom, the means of spiritual emancipation would have been more easily introduced and wielded. The connection, too, between the different phases of life is so intimate, that no vital change in one direction can long remain without acting in every other.

As the writer, quitting Rome, moved along, a foot-wayfarer, towards Florence, he met with many little adventures, in these times of religious unsettlement, which return upon his memory at this moment, with an interest in which, however willing, he would vainly attempt to make his readers sharers. Everywhere, as he proceeded, he was interrogated by curious and anxious villagers, and people by the wayside, all eager to know the news from Rome; and many a sigh and exclamation, and token of awe and wonder, broke from the listeners, as the feats and sufferings of the capital, with all the possibilities and impossibilities of the struggle, rose before their minds, in connection with the pictures which he was in circumstances to exhibit to them. A counterpart to the ludicrous disrespect for the sanctity of the pope, to which I was witness at the gates of Gaëta, showed itself after a different fashion, and one more amusing and interesting, as, after breakfasting at a village café, the morning after leaving Rome, I was slowly ascending the acclivity which led out of the hamlet, ruminating on the excitement which even a very unimportant personage may communicate among the groups of a café (and these in Italy, as well as elsewhere on the Continent, are of all classes), at a moment like that of the revolution. My eyes were bent on the ground, and taking in the shape of each foot as it came forwards from behind, slowly, when I heard a voice from above, a sort of sepulchral croak, demanding something, as it seemed, of me; and, on looking up, I was amused to see aloft, on the top of a high parapet, a Capuchin, in his brown cowl and gown, who, with the most genial smile, saluted me, and asked the news from Rome. At the question, a crowd of the holy brethren trooped to the wall from different parts of the enclosure, each more eager than the others to share the tidings. When I told them, among other things, that I had seen the cardinals' baubles in flames, the fraternity turned to one another with a stare and a giggle, not at all in malice, but partly, as I thought, from an innocent self-gratulation at their own quiet though ignoble life, a point removed from want, and yet lying far beneath the troubled atmosphere breathed by the haughty servants of the papal court; and still more in the spirit of country bumpkins, not far from town, yet forced to lead a rural life of seclusion, who have flocked to the roadside, where some wandering gipsy

retails a marvel to make them merry. The brethren were simple and courteous in their manners, and, I have no doubt, many of them had kindly hearts; but it is certainly curious to see how, in times of relaxation, even the pope and cardinals may have, among their minions, none "so poor as do them homage."

Nothing, however, in the course of the writer's wanderings among the Italian cities and mountains, struck him with so much emphasis, as the difference (already often alluded to in these papers) between what, if different things may be distinguished by different names, he would call Popery and Romanism. In the faith and worship of the Italians, there mix a device of priests and a religion: the religion is, the radical ideas of Christianity, which find a place in the minds of the most superstitious, if only in any true sense religious; and the device is, everything else overlying that religion, and which has grown out of the priesthood, bent on grasping all power-mental, moral, carnal-for purposes of self-grandeur and self-exaltation. The atrocities of popery, in their manifold forms, possess for us, at this moment, no interest; but Romanism, properly so called-or Italian Christianity, which we may further define as the type of the Christianity which is to be found in Italy-considered apart from the superstitions with which it is actually overlaid, is a topic of the greatest possible importance, and one which, in this country, has received little, or indeed no, consideration whatsoever. On the extreme top of a pile of hills, up which, by many a circuit, toils the common road to Florence from Rome, is a rude shelter of bare walls and a fireplace, erected for the passing traveller as a covert from the flying storms of these regions, or where he may rest and recruit himself, if, like the writer, he carry his simple fare along with him. I entered-looked around: sets of stones stood in a circle about the hearth, on which lay the ashes of former fires and a charred faggot. I looked round again, and saw a bare woodcut of the Virgin on the rough wall, roughly enough drawn, but touching and expressive, and with the words inscribed below, "O quam tristis et afflicta!" I was alone; the relics of life were there, but the occupants were gone: I confess that, at this moment, with the least possible disposition to romanise, I felt inexpressibly moved by the sight of this etching. A priest might have put it there, or some pure-hearted maiden, accustomed to fortify her modesty by recalling the supposed virgin life of the blessed Mary; but, if it were a priestly act, the act proceeded on the principle of the Italian mind, and of other minds of similar type and temperament, to which we may be allowed for a moment to advert particularly.

The common way, among ourselves, of regarding the Christianity of the Romans (if we allow ourselves to call it Christianity), is under the figure of a heap of "salt," which has "lost its savour"-as, in short, a system of spiritual debauchery, in the rites and ceremonies of which, crimes of every dye and description either find a recognised place, or succeed in finding for themselves a place, under some pretext, more or less thinly disguised. The state of Rome, and of every country where the Romish forms prevail, is viewed with unmixed horror, and is prayed against as a state of idolatry, excluding, unless where something equivalent to a miracle interposes, even the "first principles" of Christian truth from the minds of its votaries. It would be impossible, without

more copious space, and quite another object than belong to these reminiscences, to discuss how much truth and how much error there is in our popular estimate: enough to say against Romish objections of unfairness, that in Italy, with some of the kindest hearts in the world, the Protestant faith is identified with infidelity, and that the aspects under which Scottish ignorance represents to itself Romanism, are incomparably more true to the facts, and less bad in their origin, than those which the priesthood systematically present to Romanists as pictures of our island Protestantism. But the confusion of Romanism and Popery, and the belief that reform in Rome would imply the abolition of every religious symbol commonly associated with superstition, are mistakes-mistakes containing, it is true, some mixture of salutary prejudice, considering how insidious the employment of symbols is in priestly Romanism; but not the less mistakes, and, so far as possible, to be corrected by those who may have convictions on the subject.

It seems to the writer to be a characteristic of some nations, as it is of some classes of minds, to shoot forth every idea which they have, and their religious ideas most of all, into visible forms; while other peoples and minds retain them, as it were, invisible, in the sanctuaries of their spirits. The former set are more exposed to fall into superstition than the latter, because they are ever stimulated by their sensuous nature to picture everything to themselves; while, at the same time, history seems to prove (and the fact is not difficult of explanation) that morals among the same class are on a lower, sometimes a very much lower, standard than with the other. But it is an error to suppose that the love of visible forms for embodying ideas is, in itself and necessarily, superstitious; for a picture, having figure and colour, may really suggest a less sensuous image than a sermon: a group of Raphael's may represent a Gospel story with less admixture of alien matter than a commentary on it. Protestantism, in a word, does not, in refusing the aid of the fine arts, necessarily approach nearer to the Gospel; in the most essential respects, it in fact does so, it is true; but it is a mere accident that it employs only words, and, as in Scotland, the voice, in religious service; it might also have made use of the organ and paintings, without necessarily being less pure and severely simple than it is at present.

That the Scottish mind could not worship God in symbols, even such as a reformed Italian Christian might use, without being first debauched for the purpose, is certain; but this arises rather from the peculiarity of the type, than from the expression by it of the will of God being necessarily any purer than that of the southern type. In short, the facts and doctrines of the Gospel are fixed and unalterable, and are the same to every people among whom they are in any measure purely received; but the modes in which they may most profitably be announced may vary, within limits, with the idiosyncrasy of the people: here, balder; there, more glowing and picturesque.

Passing a Sabbath at Malta, I mixed with the throngs crowding away into the churches. I had gone but a few steps, when I heard the indistinct murmurings of an organ. I entered whence they seemed to come: the service was just commenced. On this occasion, losing all special consciousness of the creed and of the worshippers, and attaching my