, and
implicitly condemns their tactics. It is natural to oppose one extreme
by another; and those who avoid both easily appear to be capitulating
with error. The effects of this spirit of opposition are not confined to
those who are engaged in resisting the No-popery party in England, or
the revolution in Italy. The fate of the temporal power hangs neither on
the Italian ministry nor on English influence, but on the decision of
the Emperor of the French; and the loudest maintainers of the rights of
the Holy See are among that party who have been the most zealous
adversaries of the Imperial system. The French Catholics behold in the
Roman policy of the emperor a scheme for obtaining over the Church a
power of which they would be the first victims. Their religious freedom
is in jeopardy while he has the fate of the Pope in his hands. That
which is elsewhere simply a manifestation of opinion and a moral
influence is in France an active interference and a political power.
They alone among Catholic subjects can bring a pressure to bear on him
who has had the initiative in the Italian movement. They fear by silence
to incur a responsibility for criminal acts. For them it is a season for
action, and the time has not yet come when they can speak with judicial
impartiality, or with the freedom of history, or determine how far, in
the pursuit of his ambitious ends, Napoleon III. is the instrument of
Providence, or how far, without any merit of his own, he is likely to
fulfil the expectations of those who see in him a new Constantine.
Whilst they maintain this unequal war, they naturally identify the
rights of the Church with her interests; and the wrongs of the Pope are
before their eyes so as to eclipse the realities of the Roman
government. The most vehement and one-sided of those who have dwelt
exclusively on the crimes of the Revolution and the justice of the Papal
cause, the Bishop of Orleans for instance, or Count de Montalembert,
might without inconsistency, and doubtless would without hesitation,
subscribe to almost every word in Doellinger's work; but in the position
they have taken they would probably deem such adhesion a great
rhetorical error, and fatal to the effect of their own writings. There
is, therefore, an allowance to be made, which is by no means a reproach,
for the peculiar situation of the Catholics in France.

When Christine of Sweden was observed to gaze long and intently at the
statue of Truth in Rome,