stianity,
but as a state engine for the maintenance of public order and national
well-being.[1] That Milton and Cromwell may have so regarded religion is
true: but they had, besides, a personal sense of the necessity of
righteousness, the fear of God, at the root of their political
convictions. While Machiavelli and Guicciardini wished to deprive the
Popes of temporal sovereignty, in order that the worst scandals of their
Court might be suppressed, and that the peace of Italy might be secured,
Savonarola desired to purge the Church of sin, but to retain its
hierarchy and its dogmas inviolate. Neither the politicians nor the
prophet had discerned, what Luther and the nations of the North saw
clearly, that a fresh element of spiritual vitality was necessary for
the regeneration of society; or in other words, that good government
presupposes living religion, and not that religion should be used as an
engine for the consolidation of empire over the people.[2]

[1] Mach. _Disc._ i. 12, after exposing the shams on which, as
he believed, the religious institutions of Numa rested, asserts
that, however much governors may be persuaded of the falseness
of religions, it is their duty to maintain them: 'e debbono ...
come che le giudicassero false, favorirle e accrescerle.'

[2] Yet read the curious passage (_Disc_. iii. 1) in which
Machiavelli discusses the regeneration of religion by a return
to its vital principle, and shows how S. Francis and S. Dominic
had done this in the thirteenth century. It was precisely what
Luther was designing while Machiavelli was writing.

The inherent feebleness of Italy in this respect proceeded from an
intellectual apathy toward religious questions, produced partly by the
stigma attaching to unorthodoxy, partly by the absorbing interests of
secular culture, partly by the worldliness of the Renaissance, partly by
the infamy of the ecclesiastics, and partly by the enervating influence
of tyrannies. However bold a man might be, he dread of heretic; the term
_paterino_, originally applied to religious innovators, had become
synonymous in common phraseology with rogue. It was a point of good
society and refined taste to support the Church. Again, the mental
faculties of Italy had for three centuries been taxed to the utmost in
studies wide apart from the field of religious faith. Art, scholarship,
philosophy, and meditation upon politics had given a definite di