miserable barks swing in the port of the Tiber, and bring marble to sculptors from Carrara. All the common articles of life are cruelly dear. Bread and meat dearer than in London. Lodgings indeed are cheap and wretched. Clothing is of high price. Wages are small, and made less by the number of holydays. But of these wages one great part is wasted in gambling and the lottery, which is a universal passion. Another portion is wasted on holydays and on the Carnival, to hire a costume and drive in a carriage on the Corso. What remains for comfort?

If it is said that this degraded people have sunk so low that they like their bad government, that would be no reason why we should support it. But that plea fails. The Romans

have for years despised their government-now they detest it. In the winter of 1860 the people proved this in a manner not to be mistaken. The French general knew their feelings; he feared that wherever there was a crowd there would be an emeute; and he issued proclamations against crowds. French guards accompanied the pope on every public occasion, and lined the Corso during the Carnival. But the people were resolved that there should be no mistake as to their feelings. They were invited by the government to the amusements of the Carnival. They deserted the Corso, and went out of Rome in a mass. Every effort was made to get up loyal addresses to the pope, and never was there such a failure. In the American college alone was the attempt successful. In the Sapienza college, where there are between four and five hundred pupils, a dozen signatures only were obtained; and, when the authorities pressed the address on the students, they tore it to pieces, and trampled it under foot. Mr. Dicey gives us an account of two public demonstrations, of which he was an eye-witness in 1860. The one took place at Rome. The 12th of April was the anniversary of Pio Nono's return. On that day he celebrated mass at the convent of St. Agnese. The resolution was formed to show Europe how he reigned in the hearts of his people. Everything which the priests could do was done. On the line of his route from St. Agnese to the Quirinal, nuns and children, priests and monks, were arranged in groups, to wave their handkerchiefs and scatter flowers. All the faithful were gathered in the church. All who had means hired carriages to swell the procession. The journal of the day announced that crowds of the people flocked to see the pontiff, and that infinite was the number of carriages which followed the royal cortège. The French soldiers had a different impression. Patrols of these soldiers were stationed on the route, to keep back the expected crowd; but they felt they were made fools of, for crowd there was none. "To my unenlightened vision," says Mr. Dicey, "the

crowd of three miles in length was composed of one thousand persons in all, and the infinite number of carriages looked uncommonly like sixty!" We come now to a scene in Bolognathat city which was once, like Rome, desolate and gloomy, under the leaden regime of the priests. Now the papal rule is broken, the legate is gone, and they expect their king—the king of Italy. "Down the steep winding road leading from the old monastery of St. Michael, where the king is lodged, through the dark, narrow, crowded streets, a brilliant cavalcade comes riding slowly. Half a horse's length in front rides Victor Emmanuel. Amongst the Order-covered staff who follow, there is scarcely one who is not of more royal presence than their leader. There are many whose names may stand before his in the world's judgment; but the crowd has its eye fixed on the king, and the king alone. For three days this selfsame crowd has followed him, and stared at him, and cheered him; but their ardour remains undiminished. All the school children of the city, down to little mites of things who can scarcely toddle, have been brought out to see him. Boy soldiers, with Lilliputian muskets, salute him as he passes. A mob of men, heedless of the gendarmes or of the horses' hoofs, run before the cavalcade in the burning heat, and cheer hoarsely. There is no pause, indeed, in this ceaseless cheering, save where the band of exiles stand with the flags of Rome, and Naples, and Venice covered with a black veil; or when the regiments defile past with the tattered colours which were rent to shreds at San Martino and at Solferino; and then the cry of "Vivà! Vittorio Emanuele!" is changed for that of "Vivà l'Italia!"

Mr. Dicey saw the like scene at Florence, and Pisa, and Reggio, and Parma, once so dull. He saw it in the country, on a long day's journey in the Val de Chiana. Is it possible to doubt what that feeling is, and what it will do? Turn from those parts of Italy, now joyous, to these gloomy Roman states, paralysed into inactivity, a desert country, cheerless towns, without progress, without enjoyment, almost without hope. Can we believe that the Italian man is so different from the English man as to hug his own rags and love his own misery? Is it our duty to put our heel upon his head, and tread him down in the morass into which priests have sunk him, and from which he longs to rise? That ought not to be the creed of any class of politicians: assuredly not the creed of Christians. We have different hopes, and a higher aim. Help the Italians by sympathy; help them by prayer; help them effectually by using this precious season to scatter throughout Italy a knowledge of the truths which have made England great.

The events which have occurred since these remarks were penned, have served to confirm them. The brigandage of the Neapolitan states has been crushed by the reign of Cialdini.

The measures of Ricasoli are completing the unity and consolidation of Italy. The Sphynx is still at the Tuileries; and its mysterious oracles appear to puzzle and perplex the world. But opinion is reigning, and its authority will prevail. The days of difficulty and doubt will have an end. The reign of the papacy, with its Swiss and its ruffians, is drawing to a close. We shall yet live to see the king of Italy mount the steps of the Quirinal; and the pope will wander with his cardinals, despised and powerless, through the long galleries of the Vatican.

LORD LINDSAY ON SCEPTICISM.

Scepticism, a Retrogressive Movement in Theology and Philosophy, as contrasted with the Church of England, Catholic (at once) and Protestant, Stable and Progressive. By Lord Lindsay. John Murray, London. 1861.

THE dangers in religion are far greater than the dangers to religion. This is a moral fact which persons strongly possessed with the religious sentiment are very apt to overlook. Fancying that all is perfectly safe as regards themselves, merely because they have a strong religious feeling of some kind or other, or because they are strict in the observance of what they think to be right, their spiritual anxieties all take the direction of a concern for the safety of that Religion which they believe to be the only true one, and nothing awakens their alarm like the cry of "the Faith in danger." But if the Christian religion is true, it is no more in danger than the everlasting mountains, or than the sun in the firmament. The real danger is to themselves, lest, while professing the Christian faith, they should make that very faith the covert and excuse to their own minds for habits of feeling, and for practices, which will not bear the fiery ordeal of the Great Day. A man's faith may be right in its direction, while it is altogether defective or wrong in its operation; and it always is so, when it is not that faith which "worketh by love."

It is a sad and most painful fact, that professors of religion are often found to be guilty of acts, which they could in no wise excuse to themselves were it not for the soothing deception of their imagined piety and zeal for God. Things of which men of the world would be utterly ashamed, and from which selfrespect, or humane feeling alone, will be sufficient to withhold them, shall be done by religious people, with no sort of com

punction whatever, though they hereby bring a dishonour upon that very Religion for which they profess to have so high a regard. This could not be, were there not a fatal facility in the human conscience to convert even the Truth itself into the means of self-imposition.

A serious concern for the moral well-being of others, who are endangering their souls by Scepticism, or in any other way, is good however, and highly proper, independently of the person's own spiritual condition; only it behoves each one, for his own sake, not to overlook the moral fact we have noticed, because of the special danger that lurks here, inasmuch as nothing is easier than, while seeking to pluck out the mote from a brother's eye, to forget to cast out the beam that is in one's own eye. A religious profession involves, indeed, peculiar dangers, whatever may be the form it takes, or the direction in which its zeal exercises itself. There is not, probably, a more fruitful source of self-deception and ruin than this; so that, while thousands perish from the want of religion, it might perhaps with truth be said, that tens of thousands perish through religion. Paradoxical as this may sound, it will not appear so very improbable, if we only call to mind that Scepticism itself is one phase and form of the peril which arises out of, and is connected with, a true Divine Revelation. If there were no such thing as a true Faith, there could be no such thing as Scepticism. Scepticism always springs up within the Church, not outside the Church; and it is in that soil it attains its rankest strength: there, too, errors and heresies, and religious licenses of all kinds, take their rise. Nor is there much less moral danger in the opposite extreme of dogmatism, or a rigid ecclesiastical system; for, as Coleridge has well remarked,-" He who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and will end in loving himself better than all."

We have often thought what a curious and instructive volume might be written on the Dangers in Religion. What a fine scope it would afford for discussing what we may term the Philosophy of Opinion; showing how much natural constitution, temperament, habits of life, race, climate, station, peculiar employment, have to do with the religious systems which men either adopt or reject. It must have been noticed by most persons, that the members of all sects and churches are distinguished more or less, even outwardly, by some peculiar characteristics, and that often a whole sect will be segregated from others, and composed almost entirely out of some one section of society, or from persons nearly all of one kind of employment. A peculiar natural disposition or temper almost invariably marks the professors of particular creeds, so that there can be very little doubt of its determining, in the first instance, the form of their

religious profession. The Rationalist, the Pantheist, the Mystic, the devotee of Superstition, the lover of Infallibility, the Pharisee, the Sadducean Sceptic, the stickler for forms, and the rejecter of forms, would each be found to take his place under some type of diseased mind, to be the subject of some idiosyncrasy acting, like concealed iron under the ship's compass, to draw it aside from the right line of Truth. Psychological science leads, we know, into a misty region; but that is no reason why the region should not be explored, and the pitfalls to be found in it laid open to the view. Each professor of Christianity, as a matter of course, whatever may be its form or mode of development, persuades himself that what he embraces is the truth, and that, embracing that, he is safe. But then, it should never be forgotten, that it is not by the worship of truth (admitting that what he embraces is the truth), but of the God of truth-that it is not by the worship of the just, but of the just God-that it is not even by the worship of mercy, but of the God of mercy, that we grow ourselves to be merciful, just, and good.

The dangers in religion are so great, and prove the ruin of so many, just because religion itself is so excellent a thing. It is with this as it is with the material substances on which we subsist-far more are destroyed by the misuse or abuse of things wholesome in themselves, than by taking direct poison.

An antidote to Scepticism is a highly desirable thing, if such a thing can be discovered; but we must see to it, that the remedy be not worse than the disease. The Church of Rome has always professed to have a specific for this psychological malady; she has provided what she thinks to be a sure antidote in her system of Infallibility; and no one can doubt that her remedy is effectual to all who will take it in the sense of putting an end to the malady, because it puts an end, morally, to its subject. It is thus as sure a cure for all forms of mental disease as is death itself. But if he who never doubts never really believes, it follows that the faith of her disciples, substituting a fictitious infallibility for the truth of God as revealed in His Word, where "clouds and darkness are round about" it, as round about Him, or where Truth is dark from its own excessive brightness, is a nonentity. This is to substitute a false certainty (if we may be allowed the expression) for moral probability amounting to a true certainty to all who have faith to follow it; which is the only guide God has given to man in things of a moral nature.

Scepticism is no new phenomenon. It has existed as long as fallen man has existed. The only difference is, that it springs up more strongly in one age or country than another, and is most vigorous at some particular period. Nor does it always take the same form; in the same form in which it has been