eyes her
contemptible vileness and inconceivable degradation; and that those
statesmen who are moved by a secret fear to bow the knee to her, would
come hither and mark the baseness of her before whom they are content to
lower the honour and independence of their country! Such, we say, are
the first impressions of the visitor to Rome.

But a few days suffice to correct this erroneous estimate. The person
looks around him; he looks below him. There he discovers the real Rome.
It is not the Rome that is seen,--it is the Rome that is unseen,--before
which the nations tremble. Beneath his feet are tremendous agencies at
work. There are the pent-up fires that shake the globe. Rome, cut off
from all the world, and surrounded by leagues of silent and blackened
deserts, is the centre of energies that rest not day nor night, and the
action of which is felt at the very extremities of the earth. It seems,
indeed, as if Rome had been set free from all the anxieties and labours
which occupy the minds and hands of the rest of the world, of very
purpose that she might attend to only one thing. The labours of the
husbandman and the artificer she has forborne. Like the lilies of the
field, she toils not, neither does she spin. She sits in the midst of
her deserts, like the sorceress on the heath, or the conspirator in his
den, hatching plots against the world. Rome is the pandemonium of the
earth, and the Pope is the Lucifer of the world's drama. Fallen he is
from the heaven of power and grandeur which he occupied in the twelfth
century; and he and his compeers lie sunk in a very gulph of anarchy and
barbarism. Lifting up his eyes, he beholds afar off the happy nations of
Protestantism, reaping the reward of a free Bible and a free Government,
in the riches of their commerce and the stability of their power. The
sight is tormenting and intolerable, and the pontiff is stung thereby
into ceaseless attempts to retrieve his fall. If he cannot mount to his
old seat, and sit there once more in superhuman pride and unapproachable
power above the bodies and the souls of men, he may at least hope to
draw down those he so much envies into the same gulph with himself.
Hence the villanies and plots of all kinds of which Rome is full, and
which form a source of danger to the nations of Christendom, from which
they may hope to be delivered only when the Papacy shall have been
finally destroyed.

What I propose here is to sketch the _mental state_ o