rived at Naples, where his wonder-working ministry was attended with its wonted power: all ranks crowded round him, and listened in breathless interest, while, amidst tears, and sobs, and trembling convictions, he preached to them of the delusions among which they had hitherto strayed, and the fruitlessness of every hope of justification that was not founded upon the righteousness of Christ.

Seldom, indeed, have a people been blessed with such teachers as the Neapolitans-and how fearful, therefore, their responsibility! At first, indeed, they were conscious of their blessings, and earnest in the right use of them, so that not only whole crowds of citizens, but many of the chief nobility were won over from the ranks of Rome to the Protestant faith. In the midst of this success, Valdes, to whom so much of it was owing, entered into the rest of the righteous; but though he ceased from his labours, the good cause continued to go onward, until it had not only traversed the Neapolitan state, but effected a successful entrance into the island of Sicily. Nor were the Neapolitans found indifferent or faint-hearted in the first hour of danger, when the Pope endeavoured to reclaim them by the argument of persecution, and twice they successfully resisted the attempt to impose the Spanish Inquisition upon their spiritual liberties. But after success came remissness, under which they were easily overcome. The Italian Inquisition, wearing a more national character than that of Spain, and exhibiting a milder aspect, although its tender mercies were to the full as cruel, was dexterously insinuated in place of the other, and for several years Naples was so rife with religious persecution, that the best of her children were banished or destroyed, and large portions of the city depopulated, while those who remained were finally tamed into acquiescence. In this way perished the exulting hope that one Italian member at least would be added to the fair family of the Reformation. Alas for the after history of Naples! Had it but kept the faith, and imbued with its high and firm consistency some such public event as the revolt of Masaniello, how different a history might that country have furnished, which is now the most profligate and degraded of European kingdoms!

Such was the entrance, and such the progress of Protestantism, in the larger states of Italy. Nor were those of smaller note unvisited. Among these might be specified Lucca, Pisa and Sienna, Modena, Locarno and Capo d'Istria. These minor sections of Italy, divided by the unhappy fate of that conquered and feudalised country into separate, and too often antagonistic states, with whose names the Italian wars of the middle ages were so complicated, had also their eminent re

forming scholars and evangelists, whose labours were rewarded not only by popular veneration, but crowds of earnest converts. But of all the triumphs of Italian Protestantism, none was more conspicuous than its entrance into the territory of the Pontiff himself, to denounce him as a stern witness and accuser. This was especially the case in Bologna, one of the most important cities of the Papal dominion, where the progress of the reformed faith was equal to that which it obtained in any other part of Italy. So remarkable an achievement was mainly owing to the labours of John Mollio, to whom allusion has already been made among the faithful witnesses of Naples. He arrived in Bologna in 1533, and occupied a chair in its university, the oldest of all the Italian schools of learning, where he taught the doctrine of justification by faith with such acceptance in his lectures upon the Epistles of St Paul, that at length he was silenced and displaced by a mandate of the Pope. But what he had already taught could not be extinguished by such a sentence, and when he departed, his lessons remained to be communicated by his disciples. How effectively this was done was proved twelve years afterwards, when a Protestant nobleman of Bologna offered to raise six thousand soldiers to defend the evangelical principles against the Pope, if need should be, with the sword.

Thus briefly have we attempted to give a sketch of Italian Protestantism during the first part of the sixteenth centurythat era so pregnant with importance in the religious history of the world, when it might be said that a new life was to commence upon earth. With means apparently more inadequate still, and with even fainter promise of success, the doctrines of the Reformation had overspread Germany, had established themselves in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland; and had erected their stable throne upon the island of Britain, so soon to become the most honoured of their champions and witnesses. The mighty northern heart was throbbing through all its arteries, and preparing with renewed energy for an achievement, compared with which its first mighty triumph, the conquest of the West, was but a trivial enterprise. But where was Italy when such a march had commenced? Why, with an intellect so superior to the rest, and an energy that had predominated in the councils and battlefields of the age-why did she not rise and shake herself, as she had been wont, like Samson roused from his slumbers? That she should have thrown off the incubus she had endured for ages, and taken the very fore-front in an action for which she was so well equipped, was nothing more than a just and natural expectation. But Italy was not to be the leader, nor even the follower, in such an honoured movement; and though

she raised her head at that resurrection-blast which had wakened the dead, it was only to lie down again more sluggishly than ever, and be the pity or the byword of the nations that marched onward. So long the guide of the world into deeper and yet deeper darkness, she was not to enjoy the light into which the others had successfully entered; instead of this, she was to fall into the pit she had dug, and be crushed in the overthrow of the idols she had created. Such, in the present instance at least, was the doom of a most righteous retribution, under which Italy still languishes with scarcely a hope of deliverance; and it now only remains for us to inquire into those natural causes by which the retribution was accomplished.

The first of these causes, and the most immediate in its operation, was brute force and violence-the agency of persecution. When Rome is selfish, she persecutes the truth, because it is opposed to her own aggrandisement. When she is in a more devout frame-according to her own form of devotion-still she persecutes, because she believes that there is no salvation beyond her own pale. The church-that is, herself— must be advanced in whatever fashion, and the souls of men must be saved at whatever price; and upon either argument, Rome will be a persecutor to the end. For this mode of suppression, also, Italy afforded peculiar facilities, being so closely under the inspection of the Vatican, and so directly exposed to its grasp. As might be expected, when the storm commenced, it levelled in the first instance the stateliest heads, the most illustrious advocates of the new opinions, who were denounced, silenced, and banished; and when these remedies were found too gentle, the stake or the scaffold was adopted in their room. Thus it also fared with their writings, which were suppressed by the Index Expurgatorius, or destroyed by a judicial bonfire. But the Inquisition was the principal agent of Papal reconversion; and to fit it more thoroughly for the work, its power, which had hitherto been limited in Italy, was extended to an irresponsible amount, to crush and destroy without question and without stint. For twenty long years this horrid tribunal continued its operations; and its activity was manifested in crowded prisons and galleys-in the application of torture to force recantation, and the punishment of death when recantation was withheld. Even the infliction of capital punishment also was sometimes so contrived as to silence the testimony of the dying, and rob them of the honour of martyrdom. Thus, in Venice, it was by drowning, and at midnight. When the whole city was hushed, the executioner's gondola glided through the watery streets like a silent shadow, until it had reached the open sea-and then, nothing was heard

of the sentenced victim but the sullen plunge into the Adriatic, which proclaimed that all was begun and ended. Even darker modes, and of a more infamous character still, appear to have been sometimes adopted for the purpose of silencing those whose public execution would have spoken too loudly; for not a few disappeared-men know not where or how. Italy was a land of subtle poisoners, and its priests as well as politicians were acquainted with the Aqua Tofana.

But it is not by persecution alone that we are to account for the suppression of Protestantism in Italy. A brave people may endure for a while the utmost inflictions of inquisitions, or even of dragonnades; but if hearty in the cause for which they suffer, there is a point of endurance beyond which it is madness to urge them. A common evil unites them against the common enemy, and such a union is more than military discipline and strength. In this way the blood of martyrdom has ever been the seed of the church, when nothing else than martyrdom was employed; and had this been all, the Italian spirit would probably have borne itself as gallantly as the Puritanism of England, or the Covenanterism of Scotland, and with the same triumphant result. But in the political condition of unhappy Italy, we find causes enough to retard the operation of any common principle of action whatever. Instead of being an entire country, it was divided into a number of states, each having its own separate interests and individual history; and thus, the patriotism of the Italian people, which, united, might have achieved a common national independence, was frittered down into a manifold paltry provincialism, by which every town was divided against its neighbour. The same cause that prevented a combined effort for the establishment of Italian liberty, was enough to hinder the adoption of a common Protestantism). How could Venice be at one with Genoa, or Rome with Ferrara, or Florence with Verona? They would no more harmonise in a common faith than they would march under a united banner. And thus it was, that while Italy was helpless through her divisions, the common foe prevailed; and the same hostile powers of Spain, Austria, and the Popedom, which bereaved the Italians of their freedom, deprived them also of the truth. The harmonising, uniting, incorporating power of Protestantism, had thus no proper field for action, and therefore was so easily suppressed. The same disunion and consequent helplessness continues, and the result is still the same. Thus, Italy in the present day is a problem and a contradiction. It is an unquestioned fact that "knowledge is power;" but it is equally unquestionable, that intellectual Italy is the miserable serf of sluggish un-idea'd Austria.

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Such were the political causes that laid a death-touch upon Italian Protestantism at the very outset, and made it stagger and fall before it had reached the mid-way of progress. But in addition, there were impediments of an intellectual character that added their weight to the arrest. These were to be found in the principle of Italian civilization versus German barbarism. It was in Germany that the Reformation had commenced; but what was Germany that it should become the teacher of Italy? "Have any of the Pharisees believed in Him?" Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" These were the popular questions of the Jews, when our Saviour walked among them, and as such, they were received as sufficient apologies for the hazard of a general rejection. In the same mode, a similar spirit acted upon the Italians, when the first impulse of Protestant preaching had passed away. For whence had these new doctrines come for which they must dare every thing and suffer to the utmost? They had come, forsooth, from Germany, the deadliest antagonist, and finally the conqueror of Rome,-from Germany, which was only beginning to learn that other languages had existed besides her own frost-bound gibberish,-from Germany, whose monks, now so strangely become the reformers of the world, had but the other day been the well-flogged pupils of Italy in the mere accidence of civilised scholarship. And must they they the representatives of all that was glorious in the past of Rome, and all that was refined in the present of Italy-become the docile schoolboys of northern barbarians, and recognise the superiority of these hirsute men in intellectual power as well as in brute force and lucky accident? Such a feeling is more frequently experienced than expressed, and yet, it is often strong enough to determine a national bias. Would France, for instance, adopt a new religious lesson, however orthodox, from England? Or would a German theological college of the present day be moved by the writings of John Knox or Samuel Rutherford? In the same manner, Italy would not learn of Germany, however vital the lesson: she would rather be the bondman than the brother of such a teacher. Such is the world, and such the wisdom of its choice. Let but pride intervene, not merely with an individual but a nation, and the better way is pointed out in vain.

The same pride of intellect that undervalued the instructors, was equally opposed to the lessons they taught. The northern mind, cold, hard, and mathematical, is little apt to be controlled by the mere figures of fancy, or force of declamation: it must have argument and proof before it is convinced; and if these are wanting, it will not listen to the charming of the orator, charm he never so wisely. When the Reformation,