turber of the earth, and threatens to suck into the vortex in which it goes down to destruction, thrones, and nations, and dynasties. Europe never can have peace till that system of sacerdotal despotism is rooted up and cast out of every land into which it has struck its roots. Believing the papal system to be the exact historical expression of the prophetic and apocalyptic pictures of a great far-spreading and long-lasting apostasy-its seat at Rome, its head the man of sin, its pretensions blasphemous, its worship idolatrous, its agencies "lying signs and wonders, and all deceivableness of unrighteousness," -we expect its continuous wasting and decadence, under the judgment that began to sit on it in 1792, till it be finally, and amid terrible convulsions, destroyed by the "brightness of the Redeemer's coming." At present, the Papacy has come "into remembrance before God, to give her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of His wrath." She is being wasted to the uttermost, and in this the hour and power of her deserved retribution, she is one of the signs that mark the place we occupy and the time we live in. That her consumption is rapid is abundantly proved by every day's intelligence from Rome. The intelligent correspondent of the Times, writing from Italy, thus describes the present condition of the Papacy :—

"The intense hatred of the Romans for the priests and priestly rule loses, however, none of its intensity for the marvellous forbearance with which it is treasured up. The talk one hears from men of all classes, so soon as the subject is safely broached, is perfectly amazing. That the Romans, with hardly any exception, are utterly dead to all veneration for what distant Catholics hold most sacred and holy, has been matter of universal notoriety since the days of Dante, Boccaccio, Laurentius Valla, Ariosto, and Macchiavello. But hitherto,

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however they loathed and despised them, the Romans lived by their priests. The only recent experiments for the extinction of the Papacy in 1799 and 1810 reduced Rome to the condition of a French chef lieu de département, with hardly one half of its population. The Papal Court brought back with it lustre, importance, and a certain prosperity to the middle classes of the Holy City. It turned a penny by the sins of gay foreign visitors as well as by their penance; by carnival no less than holy week. A begging Church encouraged the mendicant habits of a lazy populace. Rome was half a convent, half a watering-place, and so long as the people lived by the Church they were willing enough to cry, 'Long live the Church!"

"But the Romans this year can get from the Pope neither panem nor circenses. Popular disaffection shows forth in all its nakedness. There is no Trasteverino willing to kneel as the pontifical carriage goes past, with his half-muttered Accidenti al Papa!' an exclamation in which there was more of profaneness than deliberate malice. This year the papal coach and its occupant's blessings are shunned as the plague. People take to their heels wherever he appears, and the same care is taken to get out of the way of the red tassels on the frontlets of the sleek, black, Roman-nosed steeds which announce the approach of a Prince of the Church. The real fact is, the distress among the multitude is indescribable; all the evils of bad harvests, and even worse vintages, weigh upon the whole of Italy, but are felt more intensely among those lilies of the Roman field who toil not, neither do they spin. The transition from the winter of 1859, when more than 30,000 foreign visitors emptied their purse for the benefit of Roman shops and inns, to the season of 1860, when an Englishman or a Russian is a rara avis in the Via Condotti, tells to a prodigious extent among the people, the price of whose bread was raised very sensibly even within the two short weeks I was in Rome, and for whom the very sourest wine has reached a price which their means

cannot compass. Christmas has brought the Romans no pie this year, nor will Carnival yield them fritters, nor Passion-week treat them to cross-buns and oil-cakes. Starvation stares them in the face, and the work supplied by the Government at the public expense is neither adequate to the wants of the vast multitude of sufferers nor suited to the greatest number of them, nor so distributed as to screen at least those who have recourse to it from pressing necessity. There is dire distress in Rome, and the people, whether rightly or wrongly, stoutly lay it to the blame of the Pontifical Government. It is the Pope, with his obstinacy, who prolongs the uncertainties of the present political crisis, and thus scares wealthy travellers away from their gates. It is the Pope who, by his testiness, drove his Romagnese subjects to revolt, and robbed Rome of the revenue accruing to the capital from the subjected Legations. Together with the Pope and the Papacy, the Romans fall foul of religion and its ministers. There is hardly a word of opprobrium which is not fiercely hurled at the head of the priests: hardly a disparaging sneer against those black ravens,' or 'black swine,' that does not become widely popular, so soon as it comes out as a theatrical allusion, a pasquinade, or a ballad-singer's sally. There is deep-set, ruthless, rabid inveteracy of the whole mass of the population against the entire order of the priesthood-an animosity which seeks its vent at the present moment in a thousand covert ways, but which is sure to lead to some frightful open outbreak whenever an opportunity offers itself.

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Against this pent-up, but hardly concealed implacable feeling of animosity, the Pope has nothing to oppose save prayers, blessings, and a firm resolution to follow the first martyrs of the Church into the Catacombs. His head minister, or secretary of state, wholly intent upon the accumulation of ill-gotten wealth, plays on his sovereign's fond, superstitious enthusiasm, to set him against his long-enduring imperial protector, and prolong this state of antagonism between Rome and

France till such time as he may have made the whole or the best part of that wealth safe against the wrath to come. The Pope's zealous Ultramontanist champions, English, Irish, French, and Germans, beset the halls of the Vatican, encourage Pius IX. in his most absurd conceits, promise him crusades and levées des boucliers all over the Catholic world; they raise the cry of Austria to the rescue!' they dream of revolutions in France, of leagues of the 'Reds' with the 'Blacks,' of defections of troops, of sudden miraculous catastrophes, hastened, may be, by some 'providential' stroke, such as the one which rid the French throne of a half-converted, latitudinarian, Huguenot king. Among these worthies, some of the principal agents and officers of the French Emperor at Rome are, I know not with what good ground, confidently numbered-the now recalled Duc de Grammont, whose scanty intelligence is, in the opinion of some persons, eked out by more than diplomatic duplicity; and General Goyon, for whose talents, or, indeed, common-sense, the Romans never entertained the slightest respect, and whose religious zeal, however great it may be supposed, is not certainly proof against a single frown of his imperial master. The Romans, indeed, conceive that the good general's demeanour towards ce bon Saint Père' is greatly altered of late, and especially since the arrival of the imperial intimation to which I alluded at the opening of this letter; and they describe him as listening to the Pope's speech at the opening of the American colleges in a supercilious, nonchalant, more than half-bored attitude, as of a man who has played his farce as far as he deemed it expedient, and considers himself now free from awkward and irksome restraint."

The Times justly remarks :

"The Pope appears at this moment to be very sick;— more sick than the Turk was even when Nicholas thought it time to take out administration to his effects. He has no strength whatever in his own body. Weak

and tottering, he sometimes leans upon one strong man and sometimes upon another. Austria has held him up in the Legations, France has kept him upright at Rome, the Swiss have spread the terror of his name in the unwarlike towns. To all human foresight he seems on the brink of dissolution, and we should expect to see the crazy old bark go down in deep water if we did not remember how often before the same crisis has appeared at hand, and how wonderfully the waterlogged and dismantled hull has got into port again. It is wonderful, and at the same time pitiable, to mark the senile and impotent tenacity with which this old man clings to his right to do wrong at a moment when the whole system seems ready to perish. No person is more unreasonable to deal with than a man who is ready to stand still and be a martyr, but who makes it a point of conscience to continue to martyrize others. Pio Nono cannot in his conscience prevent that cloud of ecclesiastical locusts from devouring the Roman people, and he cannot withdraw his countenance from the kidnapping of Jews and the sack and pillage of Italian cities; but Pio Nono is quite content to die upon the steps of the Vatican if either Napoleon III. or Francis Joseph should wish to put him to death. They may break him, but they shall not bend him. They may demand from the Pope indispensable reforms in his States;' but he will refuse to do anything except to submit to death or exileedifying the Catholic world with the exhibition of a Pope persecuted by the two eldest sons of the Church. Now, of course, this is precisely what no one wishes to do. No one out of Rome has any desire to injure a hair of the head of this obstinate old man. But so long as the French remain to protect him he will by his ecclesiastics and his bravos drain the country and destroy the people; and, if the French go away, the people, exasperated beyond all moderation, will probably expel him. This is the dilemma. How it may end no man can foresee, but, in every event, we have great cause to congratulate ourselves that we Englishmen have no art or part in this matter."