he can restrict or cancel at his pleasure. On Ultramontane principles the Church is in a normal and flourishing condition in proportion as it is ruled, administered, supervised, and regulated, down to the minutest details, in all its branches and national boundaries, from Rome. Rome is to act as a gigantic machine of ecclesiastical administration, a Briareus with a hundred arms, which finally decides everything, which reaches everywhere with its denunciations, censures, and manifold means of repression, and secures a rigid uniformity. For the Church-ideal of the Ultramontanes is the Romanizing of all particular Churches, and above all the suppression of every shred of individuality in National Churches.1 Nay, more, they consider it the conscientious duty of all nations to mould themselves, to the utmost of their power, into the specifically clerico-Italian fashion of thinking and feeling. How should they not, when the Civiltà says roundly, "As the Jews were formerly God's people, so are the Romans under the New Covenant. They have a supernatural dignity” ?2

[" Romanism," "Romanize," etc., are used by German writers not as synonymous terms with Roman Catholicism, etc., but for the Romanist or Ultramontane party in the Roman Catholic Church.-TR.]

2 Vol. iii. p. 11, 1862. Sopranaturale essendo il fine, per cui Iddio conserva lo stato Romano, sopranaturale in qualche modo si vedrà essere la dignità di questo popolo." These praises of the so-called Roman people, which no longer exists-for the population of Rome is a mere fluctuating

The Ultramontane knows nothing higher than the breath and law of Rome. For him Rome is an ecclesiastical address and inquiry-office, or rather a standing oracle -the Civiltà calls the Pope summum oraculum,—which can give at once an infallible solution of every doubt, speculative or practical. While others are guided in their judgment on facts and events by the moral and religious sentiment developed in their Church-life, with Ultramontanes the authority of Rome and the typical example of Roman morals and customs are the embodiment of the moral and ecclesiastical law. If Jewish parents are forcibly robbed of their child in Rome, that he may be brought up a Christian, the Ultramontane finds it quite in order that natural human rights should yield to the ordinances of Rome, however late devised, although theologians used to maintain that in this case the law of Nature is the law of God, and therefore above any mere human and ecclesiastical ordinance. If the Inquisition still proclaims excommunication in the States of medley of Italians, and especially Italian clerics, from all parts of the Peninsula-seem to be phrases brought up from a former age. Thus, for example, in 1626, Carrerio, Provost and Professor at Padua, says, "The Italians are exalted above all nations by the special grace of God, who gives them in the Pope a spiritual monarch, who has put down from their thrones great kings and yet mightier emperors, and set others in their place, to whom the greatest kingdoms have long paid tribute, as they do to no other, and who dispenses such riches to his courtiers that no king or emperor has ever had so much to give."

the Church against every son and daughter if they omit to denounce their parents, and get them put into prison for using flesh or milk on a fast-day, or reading a book on the Index, the Romanist is prepared to justify this too. If the Roman Government, by its lottery, openly conducted by priests, fosters the passion for gambling, and produces the ruin of whole families, the Civiltà composes an apology for the lottery, although Alexander VII. and Benedict XIII. forbade it under pain of excommunication. If in Rome, clergymen (the so-called preti di piazza) stand in the public places till some one hires them for a mass, this gives no more offence to the Romanist than the sale of indulgence-bills; and so the Roman commissionaires, after showing visitors the various sights of the place, finally point out this spectacle to them. He thinks it at least very excusable that the very utmost is got out of dispensations and indulgences as a mine of pecuniary profit; that, for instance, the indulgences of "privileged altars" are sold to certain churches at a scudo apiece, thus giving occasion to the grossest superstition about the delivery of souls from Purgatory; that certain marriage dispensations are granted to the wealthy for a high price, which are denied to the poorer; that some kinds of matrimonial causes are car

ried to Rome, against the express stipulation of treaties, and the citizens thereby subjected to protracted and costly processes, as happened not long since in a German State, when this new encroachment seemed to the local bishops so strong a case, that they made energetic representations at Rome on the subject, which resulted in the demand being given up for a while, and the question being allowed to be settled on the spot.

Rome on her part omits no means of confirming the whole Catholic world in this clerico-Italian manner of thinking and feeling. More than nine-tenths of the Roman congregations and tribunals are composed of Italians, and they regulate everything through their precepts and decisions, spun out into the minutest and most frivolous detail, and issued in the name of the Pope. Every breath of religious life is to be drawn by Italian rule. Bishoprics out of Italy are to be filled, as far as possible, by men who have got the Catholic mind in Rome, or who at least have been trained by the Jesuits or their pupils.

The more questions any country or diocese refers to Rome the more dispensations, indulgences, altar privileges, consecrated objects, and the like, it receives from Rome-the more presents of money it sends there, so

much the higher praise it gets for piety and genuine Catholic sentiment. What is called Catholicity can only be attained in the eyes of the Court of Rome by every one translating himself and his ideas, on every subject that has any connexion with religion, into Italian. If, in points where the Italian form or view, or practice or manner of devotion, conflicts with their national feeling, or is being forced into the place of what is native and suits them better, Germans or Frenchmen or Englishmen repudiate the foreign use, they are said to be on a wrong road, they are not "genuine Catholics," but only liberal Catholics; for so the Society of Jesus distinguishes what we should call "Ultramontane," or simply "Catholic."

The root of the whole Ultramontane habit of mind is the personal infallibility of the Pope, and accordingly the Jesuits declare it to be the wish of true Catholics that this dogma should be defined at the forthcoming Council. If this desire is accomplished, a new principle of immeasurable importance, both retrospective and prospective, will be established—a principle which, when once irrevocably fixed, will extend its dominion