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more among old friends and in his own country, was bounded. The thirty years remaining to him he spent either in his rooms in the Albany, or in a country-house near London, leading always the life of a modest English gentleman. Though by nature retiring, he delighted in genial society. This and his intense love of literature-a love which not only made him master of all the great works of the classics, but led him to read and annotate the whole of the Elizabethan dramatists-made for him a happy existence. His work was accomplished; he had no more restless ambition to remain unsatisfied. He declined almost every distinction that could be offered him: a seat in Parliament, the Chairmanship of the Board of Directors, a Peerage, a mission to settle the revolted Provinces of Canada, the permanent Under-Secretaryship for India, the office of Governor-General. It will be believed that such a man did not resolve on this complete retirement from active life without much and often-renewed consideration. But he decided, and many years afterwards again recorded his judgment that he had decided rightly, that his health made it impossible to do any more work in India, and that his natural disposition, and his whole political training, disqualified a man who was too shy to propose a health after dinner, and who was accustomed to decide and act on the most momentous occasions without consultation with others, from any useful work under the conditions of public discussion, and explanation, and compromise, required in all English statesmanship. But his interest in India was unabated. With conscientious and careful labour, extending over six years, he wrote his admirable History of India'; and we have ample evidence in the concluding chapters of Sir Edward Colebrooke's volumes, how great and how important was their influence upon those who went to listen to the lessons of mature experience and wisdom which the venerable old man taught, though with the diffidence and humility which never ceased to characterize him.

The end came in 1861. On the 20th day of November he died by a stroke of paralysis which caused him little or no suffering. Mountstuart Elphinstone's body lies in Limpsfield Churchyard. His statute is in St. Paul's. It seems fitting that his memorial should be near that of the man he honoured sɔ deeply. The words he found to express his admiration for the Duke of Wellington may serve us here. What we reverence and would desire to imitate in Mountstuart Elphinstone are 'his perfect sincerity, his simplicity and simpleness of purpose, and his all-ruling sense of duty.'

ART. IV.-I. Of the Five Wounds of the Holy Church. An Essay dedicated to the Catholic Clergy (1832). By Antonio Rosmini. Edited, with an Introduction by H. P. Liddon, D. D., Canon Residentiary of St. Paul's. London, 1883. 2. C. M. Curci, Sacerdote. Il Vaticano Regio. Tarlo Superstite della Chiesa Cattolica;* Studii dedicati al giovane clero ed al laicato credente. Firenze, Roma, 1883.

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T is, to say the least of it, a happy coincidence, that the same year, which has given us the important and instructive work of Padre Curci, has also produced an English translation of the now almost classical Five Wounds of the Church,' by Antonio Rosmini, with Dr. Liddon's valuable Preface. These books may be said to represent for us two epochs in the history of the Church in Italy during the present century; one, that of the aspirations which were current in the minds of her most enlightened sons under Gregory XVI. and in the early years of Pius IX., the other that of the disappointed hopes and anxious forebodings which have made themselves felt under the pontificate of Leo XIII. Rosmini's book seems to be striving after an unfulfilled ideal; Curci's, on the other hand, to be depicting a painful reality. Rosmini displays before us the Church, wounded indeed, but still capable of restoration; Curci, though he professes his faith in the Church, and even his devotion to the Roman See, yet pictures for us the evils of Vaticanism in such vivid and startling colours, that the predominant feeling in our minds as we close his book is like that with which we turn away from one of Orcagna's ghastly representations in the Campo Santo at Pisa. Corruption and the gnawing worm seem to have taken the place of the wounded but still living body. Dr. Liddon tells us in a biographical sketch, of which our only complaint is that it is not longer, the main particulars of Rosmini's life. A man of good birth and of considerable fortune, with an irresistible vocation for the priesthood, and at once a philosopher and ascetic, he seems to have gone through a training as severe as some primitive or medieval Father, first in the studious leisure of his own home at Rovereto, and then at the Calvary near Domo d'Ossola, close to the Italian foot of the Simplon Pass; and to have spent the rest of his life between the foundation of an Institute of Charity and the composition of various religious and philosophical works. On one occasion he was sent by the Piedmontese Government on an embassy to Rome, to obtain Papal aid

The Royal Vatican; the surviving canker-worm of the Catholic Church.

against Austria. This, however, broke down, and any hopes which had been entertained of winning Pius IX.'s adherence to the liberal interest were soon destined to have the same fate. Two of Rosmini's own works were put in the list of prohibited books, and it was not till 1854 that the censure on his writings was removed, just a year before the author's death.

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The Cinque Piaghe' was kept in MS. for fourteen years. Written in 1832, it first saw the light in the brief period of hope which marked the beginning of the reign of Pius IX. Padre Curci tells us with what a storm of unpopularity it was received in certain circles. Yet in reading it we are struck by its calm and philosophical tone, and especially by its freedom from those attacks on living persons which characterize the. literature of Italy, alike in the pages of the 'Divina Commedia' and in the popular newspaper of the present hour. It is less of a declamation than of an historical enquiry. To quote the words of the English Preface:

'The title of the book is more mystical than its contents would lead us to suspect. . . It was probably suggested to the writer by his sojourn on the hill of the Calvary near Domo d'Ossola. It presupposes an analogy which naturally results from the well-known language of St. Paul, between Our Lord's natural Body, crucified through weakness, and His mystical Body, the Church, pierced by the sins and errors of men in the ages of Christian history. . . These wounds, according to Rosmini, are a legacy of feudalism. Beginning with the wound in the left hand of the Crucified, he sees in it the lack of sympathy between the clergy and people in the act of public worship, which is due, not merely to the use of a dead language in the Church services, but to the want of adequate Christian teaching. This is to be accounted for by the wound in the right hand-the insufficient education of the clergy; and this again was both caused and perpetuated by the great wound in the side, which pierced the heart of the Divine sufferer, and which consisted in the divisions among the bishops, separating them from one another, and also from their clergy and people, in forgetfulness of their true union in the Body of Christ. Such divisions were to be referred to the nomination of the bishops by the civil power, which often had the effect of making them worldly schemers and politicians, more or less intent on selfish interests. It formed the wound of the right foot. But the claim to nominate was itself traceable to the feudal period, when the freehold tenures of the Church were treated as fiefs by an overlord or suzerain, who saw in the chief pastors of the flock of Christ only a particular variety of vassals or dependents. In the modern results of this estimate Rosmini notes the wound of the left foot.

With much in Rosmini's Pages that the English reader will sympathize in and admire, there is a good deal that will sur

prise him. Not only, as Dr. Liddon says, will his unfaltering belief in the Papal supremacy be out of harmony with Anglican ideas, but many readers will be astonished to find Gregory VII. figuring as one of the shining lights instead of the bugbears of history, and his pontificate described as a turningpoint in the hitherto downward course of the Church. So again it will be a new assertion to many among us, that we owe the idea of a constitutional instead of an absolute monarchy to the Catholic Church, which, by imposing conditions on rulers (as on the Emperor Henry IV.), paved the way for our modern conceptions of a compact between the sovereign and the people.

Another peculiarity of Rosmini's work is his hatred of Gallicanism, and of everything that makes the Church national rather than Catholic, or, perhaps we should say, Roman. He would rather that the Church should forfeit her temporalities, than allow that bishops should be holders of State baronies, or that the clergy should be in any way hampered by the favours of the secular power. On nothing does he express himself more forcibly than on the interference of kings like Henry I. of England in questions of investiture, and on the conduct of prelates like Paschal II. and our own St. Anselm on such occasions.

In a word, Rosmini pushes his zeal for the independence of the Church from State control to the furthest conceivable point. At the same time he would allow the laity to have a voice in the election of bishops, or at least to have the power of accepting or rejecting them when elected. But that a bishop should be a royal nominee, is in his eyes a transaction little better than simoniacal; and the devoted loyalty and sense of nationality in the minds of the Gallican clergy was, according to him, the cause of their ruin in the terrible catastrophe of the Revolution.

A gulf of nearly forty years lies between the publication of Rosmini's work and our own day. That period has been one of many startling changes, especially in Italy, and was marked in 1862 by a crisis with regard to episcopal elections, which, had advantage been taken of the opportunities then given, might have made it an epoch of untold good in the history of the Church.

In that year, owing to the unhappy disagreements between Victor Emmanuel, recently raised to the throne of Italy, and Pius IX., a large number of sees, among them the Metropolitan See of Milan and the Archiepiscopal See of Turin, were without bishops. At the same time the Court of Rome, by a decree of

the Roman Penitentiary, forbad the bishops and clergy of the kingdom of Italy to take any part in the public prayers for their king and country on the national anniversary of the Statuto, June 1. Here was a political complication of excessive difficulty; yet one which would have admitted of solution, if the statesmen of the day had possessed any knowledge of Church history, or if the bishops and theologians of Italy had been endued with greater wisdom, learning, and courage, and had been able, in a word, to distinguish the Church from the Pope.

It may not be wholly irrelevant to observe here that three letters, issued by an anonymous hand, obtained a considerable circulation at the time in Italy. They bore on the question of the day, and treated of the relations between the Papacy and the State, showing that the bishop of Rome has no authority to summon bishops from other countries, without the Sovereign's permission, as he did, for instance, in 1862; that the claim of the Papacy to appoint bishops has no foundation in primitive antiquity; that the Pope has no right to extort from them oaths of allegiance; that bishops should be synodically elected, not arbitrarily chosen; that it is uncanonical to keep sees open more than three months; that Concordats between Sovereigns and the Pope are an infringement on the rights of the clergy and of the people; and that the only way out of actual difficulties would be to fall back on the system of the Primitive Church. Perhaps the best tribute that could have been paid to the importance and opportuneness of those letters was, what actually happened, that the supposed author received an intimation from Cardinal de Angelis that a pension would be bestowed upon him if he would cease from writing.'

The opportunity, however, was not seized; the misleading maxim of Cavour, 'Libera chiesa in libero stato,' prevailed; and in 1871 (May 12th) the 'Law of Guarantees was passed, surrendering to the Papacy the appointment to bishoprics in Italy and Sicily. We shall see from Padre Curci's book, that the Italian clergy have not profited much from this change. But first, we must devote a few words to the personal history of its author.

Carlo Maria Curci (better known from his connection with the Jesuit order as Padre Curci) is now in his seventy-fifth year. Owing partly to his natural energies, and partly to the austere simplicity of his life (he rises at 3 every morning, says mass at 5 o'clock, and devotes many hours of the day to study), he seems still to be possessed of far more bodily and mental vigour than many younger men. This is attested by his having,

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