ed.

These considerations will help to explain how it was that the Church, in
spite of its corruption, stood its ground and retained the respect of
the people in Italy. We must moreover bear in mind that, bad as it was,
it still to some extent maintained the Christian verity. Apart from the
Roman Curia and the Convents, there existed a hierarchy of able and
God-fearing men, who by the sanctity of their lives, by the gravity of
their doctrine, by the eloquence of their preaching, by their
ministration to the sick, by the relief of the poor, by the maintenance
of hospitals, Monti di Pieta, schools and orphanages, kept alive in the
people of Italy the ideal at least of a religion pure and undefiled
before God.[1] In the tottering statue of the Church some true metal
might be found between the pinchbeck at the summit and the clay of the
foundation.

[1] See the life of S. Antonino, the good Archbishop of
Florence.

It must also be remembered how far the worldly interests and domestic
sympathies of the Italians were engaged in the maintenance of their
Church system. The fibers of the Church were intertwined with the very
heartstrings of the people. Few families could not show one or more
members who had chosen the clerical career, and who looked to Rome for
patronage, employment, and perhaps advancement to the highest honors.
The whole nation felt a pride in the Eternal City: patriotic vanity and
personal interest were alike involved in the maintenance of the
metropolis of Christendom, which drew the suites of ambassadors,
multitudes of pilgrims, and the religious traffic of the whole of Europe
to the shores of Italy. It was easy for Germans and Englishmen to reason
calmly about dethroning the Papal hierarchy. Italians, however they
might loathe the temporal power, could not willingly forego the
spiritual primacy of the civilized world.

Moreover, the sacraments of the Church, the absolutions, consecrations,
and benedictions which priests dispensed or withheld at pleasure, had by
no means lost their power. To what extent even the nations of the north
still clung to them is proved by our own Liturgy, framed in the tumult
of war with Rome, yet so worded as to leave the utmost resemblance to
the old ritual consistent with the spirit of the Reformation. Far more
imposing were they in their effect upon the imagination of Italians, who
had never dreamed of actual rebellion, who possessed the fountain of
Apostolical pr