dhood. After entering the priesthood, young
Mastai devoted most of his energies to active charity, and remained,
as he said, 'no politician,' being singularly ignorant of the world
and of public affairs, though full of amiable wishes that everyone
should be happy. Some years spent in missionary work in South America
failed to enlarge his practical knowledge, the limits of which he was
the first to recognise--a fact that tended to make him all his life
the instrument, not of his own will, but of the wills of men whom he
honestly thought cleverer and more experienced than himself. His chief
friends in his Romagnol diocese, friends on the intimate basis of
social equality and common provincial interests, were sound patriots,
though not revolutionists, and the future Pio Nono involuntarily
adopted their ideas and sympathies. He saw with his eyes certain
abuses so glaring that they admitted of no two opinions, and these
helped to convince him of the truth of his friends' arguments in
favour of a completely new order of things. One such abuse was the
encouragement given by government to the Society of the Centurioni,
the latest evolution of the Calderai; the Centurions, recruited among
roughs and peasants, were set upon the respectable middle classes,
over which they tyrannised by secret accusations or open violence: it
was well understood that anyone called a Liberal, or Freemason, or
Carbonaro could be beaten or killed without inquiries being made.

The Bishop of Imola was frequently in the house of the Count and
Countess Pasolini, who kept their friend well supplied with the new
books on Italian affairs; thus he read not only D'Azeglio's _Cast di
Romagna_, but also Cesare Balbo's _Le Speranze d'Italia,_ which
propounded a plan for an Italian federation, and Gioberti's _Primato
morale e civile degli Italiani_, in which this plan was elaborately
developed. Gioberti indicated the Supreme Pontiff as the natural head
of the Italian Union, and the King of Sardinia as Italy's natural
deliverer from foreign domination. The eternal fitness of things, and
the history of many centuries, proved the Pope to be the proper
paramount civil authority in Italy, 'which is the capital of Europe,
because Rome is the religious metropolis of the world.' An ex-member
of 'Young Italy,' a Piedmontese by birth, a priest by ordination,
Gioberti's profession of faith was derived from these three sources,
and it attracted thousands of Italians by its a