Excerpt from The Pope in the Nineteenth Century

When young Italy raised her banner, now nearly twenty years ago, two elements predominated in Italy: superstition and mate rialism. Superstition was the habit of a part of the population, to which all light, all education was forbidden, which was led astray by a traditional religious sentiment conceived in the nar rowest spirit, and which, deprived of every motive of action, of all consciousness of the true life of citizens, clung with a kind of despair to a heaven little understood. Materialism was the natural reaction of those who had been able to emancipate themselves from the abject spectacle which religion offered, from the brutal yoke that it was wished to impose upon their intelligence. It was said to them, Believe all that we afirm they replied by denying all. Luther compared the human mind to a drunken peasant upon horseback, leaning over on one side, and who falls on the other, when you seek to set him upright. Many peoples have passed through a similar experience. Young Italy rejected at once and equally, materialism and superstition. It declared that im order to acquire the strength necessary to become a nation, Italy must emancipate herself at the same time from the old Catholic belief, and from the materialism of the eighteenth century. The first gave a pretended divine sanction to immobility; the second, dried up the sources of faith, and must necessarily end in destroy ing the idea of duty, and in leaving nothing for the object of human worship, but right and enjoyment. We wished to march with the world, as is the will of God, the Life eternal. We did not wish to combat in order to conquer the satisfaction of certain appetites, panem et circenses, but for something more elevated, the dignity, the sacred liberty of the human soul, its development in love, a mission upon earth for our own and for our brethren's good. V'

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