In Italy the danger is other. The Roman Church has long ceased to be a
distinctly religious institution; it has become a great human machine
organized, disciplined like an army, for a war of shadows and
formalities, but now employed in the conquest of political influence,
a kingdom absolutely of this world. It is as much a foreign body in
Italy (or France) as if it were the Russian Church; it has no part
or lot in the well-being of the Italian people, and, so far as the
central power of it is concerned, the Vatican and its councils, its
only purpose is to acquire political influence for its own political
aggrandizement, to the exclusion from its field of operations of
all other creeds. For the attainment of this end it works with the
single-eyedness which Christ recommended for other ends, to the
neglect of all pressure on the people in the direction of common
morality. The Pope, in the present case an amiable, excellent
ecclesiastic, is only one part of this machine, and through him it
speaks, saying, practically, to the Italian people, "Be what you
please, do what you please; only in all things which we command obey
us,"--obedience to the prescriptions of rites and ceremonies being,
so far as my observation during my years of residence in Italy goes,
considered as of far greater importance than the observance of the
laws of sexual morality, veracity, or common honesty.
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