asked--and I have been asked innumerable times--why not cut
short misunderstandings by the immediate publication of the lectures,
which must, as a whole, have been written beforehand? why wait for
five months? For this I had two reasons: first, it was not merely a
question of misunderstanding. Much of what I had actually said had
made an unpleasant impression in many quarters, especially among our
optimists. I should, therefore, with my bare statements, have become
involved in an agitating discussion in pamphlets and newspapers, and
that was not an attractive prospect. The second reason was this: I
expected that the further progress of events in Italy, the
irresistible logic of facts, would dispose minds to receive certain
truths. I hoped that people would learn by degrees, in the school of
events, that it is not enough always to be reckoning with the figures
"revolution," "secret societies," "Mazzinism," "Atheism," or to
estimate things only by the standard supplied by the "Jew of Verona,"
but that other factors must be admitted into the calculation; for
instance, the condition of the Italian clergy, and its position
towards the laity, I wished, therefore, to let a few months go by
before I came before the public. Whether I judged rightly, the
reception of this book will show.

I thoroughly understand those who think it censurable that I should
have spoken in detail of situations and facts which are gladly
ignored, or touched with a light and hasty hand, and that especially
at the present crisis. I myself was restrained for ten years by these
considerations, in spite of the feeling which urged me to speak on
the question of the Roman government, and it required the
circumstances I have described, I may almost say, to compel me to
speak publicly on the subject. I beg of these persons to weigh the
following points. First, when an author openly exposes a state of
things already abundantly discussed in the press, if he draws away
the necessarily very transparent covering from the gaping wounds
which are not on the Church herself, but on an institution nearly
connected with her, and whose infirmities she is made to feel, it may
fairly be supposed that he does it, in agreement with the example of
earlier friends and great men of the Church, only to show the
possibility and the necessity of the cure, in order, so far as in