ry noble aspiration
towards sacrifice,--they take from them the faith that inspires
confidence in victory, and renders even the defeat of to-day fruitful of
triumph on the morrow. The same men who urge upon them the duty of
shedding their blood for an idea begin by declaring to them: _There is
no hope of any future for you. Faith in immortality--the lesson
transmitted to you by all past humanity--is a falsehood; a breath of
air, or trifling want of equilibrium in the animal functions, destroys
you wholly and forever. There is even no certainty that the results of
your labors will endure; there is no Providential law or design,
consequently no possible theory of the future; you are but building up
to-day what any unforeseen fact, blind force, or fortuitous circumstance
may overthrow to-morrow._

They teach these brothers of theirs, whom they desire to elevate and
ennoble, that they are but dust,--a necessary, unconscious secretion of
I know not what material substance; that the _thought_ of a Kepler or
Dante is _dust_, or rather _phosphorus_; that genius, from Prometheus to
Jesus, brought down no divine spark from heaven; that the _moral law_,
free-will, merit, and the consequent progress of the _Ego_, are
illusions; that events are successively our masters,--inexorable,
irresponsible, and insuperable to human will.

And they see not that they thus confirm that servile submission to the
_accomplished fact_, that doctrine of _opportunity_, that bastard
Machiavellism, that worship of temporary interests, and that
indifference to every great idea, which find expression in our country
at the present day in the betrayal of national duty by our higher
classes, and in the stupid resignation of our masses.

IV.

I invoke the rising--and I should die consoled, even in exile, could I
see the first signs of its advent, but this I dare not hope--I invoke
the rising of a truly Italian school;--a school which, comprehending the
causes of the downfall of the Papacy, and the impotence of the merely
negative doctrine which our Italian youth have borrowed from superficial
French materialists and the German copyists, should elevate itself above
both, and come forward to announce the approaching and inevitable
religious transformation which will put an end to the existing divorce
between thought and action, and to the crisis of egotism and immorality
through which Europe is passing.

I invoke the rising of a school destined to prepa