and marrow,--such as God inflicts on His chosen
persons and institutions. There is abundance of dross, and time is
necessary before the gold can come pure out of the furnace. In the
course of this process it may happen that the territorial dominion
will be interrupted, that the State may be broken up or pass into
other hands; but it will revive, though perhaps in another form, and
with a different kind of government. In a word, _sanabilibus
laboramus malis_--that is what I wished to show; that, I believe, I
have shown. Now, and for the last forty years, the condition of the
Roman States is the heel of Achilles of the Catholic Church, the
standing reproach for adversaries throughout the world, and a
stumbling-block for thousands. Not as though the objections, which
are founded on the fact of this transitory disturbance and discord in
the social and political sphere, possessed any weight in a
theological point of view, but it cannot be denied that they are of
incalculable influence on the disposition of the world external to
the Church.

Whenever a state of disease has appeared in the Church, there has
been but one method of cure,--that of an awakened, renovated, healthy
consciousness and of an enlightened public opinion in the Church.
The goodwill of the ecclesiastical rulers and heads has not been able
to accomplish the cure, unless sustained by the general sense and
conviction of the clergy and of the laity. The healing of the great
malady of the sixteenth century, the true internal reformation of the
Church, only became possible when people ceased to disguise or to
deny the evil, and to pass it by with silence and concealment,--when
so powerful and irresistible a public opinion had formed itself in
the Church, that its commanding influence could no longer be evaded.
At the present day, what we want is the whole truth, not merely the
perception that the temporal power of the Pope is required by the
Church,--for that is obvious to everybody, at least out of Italy, and
everything has been said that can be said about it; but also the
knowledge of the conditions under which this power is possible for
the future. The history of the Popes is full of instances where their
best intentions were not fulfilled, and their strongest resolutions
broke down, because the interests of a firmly compacted class
resisted like an im