The Sun.
London, England, 1861-02-26 00:00:00

REFORMATION IN ITALY.

The Italian Reformation has already begun. We
cannot, indeed, claim that the work of proselytism
has as yet made much progress among the people,
but it is quite evident that the whole relations of
Church and State in Italy have in the last two years
undergone a great and most salutary modification.
The mere theologian may think this of little mo-
ment unless attended by a radical change of dogmas,
by the substitution of the Bible for the authority
of an infallible Church, and of private judgment
for tame and absolute submission. In a Jewish

legend, however, not admitted in our Apocryphy, a
story is told of a Jew at the Court of Ptolemy
Philopater, who, being told to put off a journey on
account of some evil omen connected with the flight
of a bird, shot it on the spot, with the remark,
" How can that miserable bird predict my destiny
when it could not foresee its own ?" We can easily
imagine that the days are not far distant when
some such argument will be applied to the Papacy,
—when mankind, reading the long indictment pre-
ferree against the Pope and his Ministers by M.
Lagueronniere, will begin to ask themselves—Can
this Government, so full of ignorance, obstinacy,
and stolid indifference, so utterly unable to under-
sten d its own position, to measure the forces arrayed
against it with its own powers of resistance, the
name of which has become synonymous with blun-
dering, incapacity, and reckless perversity,—can
this Government be on the one side of the line
which separates spiritual things from temporal,
absolutely infallible, and on the other, not only
fallible, but the most signal failure on record ?
This will doubtless come in its own season ; in the
meanwhile we have to take note of a change not
wrought by the opinion of the masses, but by the
wisdom of the Government, but which, neverthe•
less, deserves the name not only of Reform, but of
Reformation.
Perhaps the saddest legacy which the old Roman
world has bequeathed to - the Roman Catholic
Church, and, through it, to modern society, is the
institution of Monaehism. It was not unnatural
at a time when everything seemed hastening to
complete destruction, when the end of the world
was a matter of hourly expectation, that men
should fly from the pollution and disorder of a
society buried under its own ruins, and seek in the
deserts of the Thebaid a solace for their despair in
meditation and asceticism. Nor was it unnatural
that, in the Middle Ages, men averse to care or to
pleasure by temperament and conviction should
form themselves into religious societies, and, shut
out from a; odious and repulsive world, seek peace
and ease oven at the expense of weariness and
monotony. Nor is it surprising that in ages of
blood and violence the Church should consider it
her highest and most cherished privilege to be free
from the jurisdiction of the secular courts, and alone
able to try the delinquencies of her members. Every
petty baron had the right of being judge in his own
cause, and why not the great spiritual corporation
which set its feet on the necks of princes, and which
in the crusade against the Albigenses solemnly
awarded execution against a whole people ? But
it is most astonishing that in the days in which we
live there should be found any country in Europe
where laws are required to prevent the labour
which should till the land from being wasted in
the listless and often flagitious indolence of monas-
teries, and to place ecclesiastical persons accused of
crime at the bar of the ordinary tribunals.
By a decree of the present active and intelligent
Government of Naples the two Concordats wrung
from the necessities of an unstable tyranny by. the
Court of Rowe are solemnly annulled and declared
void. All persons, of whatever creed, are declared
equal before the law, and ecclesiastics have no longer
any peculiar exemption. All monastic orders for
either sex cease to be recognised by the Govern-
ment. The same fate has fallen on benefices of all
kinds without cure of souls, and on all chapters of
collegiate churches. The property of the religious
houses is taken into the hands of the Government,
and is to be charged, first with popular education,
next with the augmentation of the salaries of parish
priests and with the relief of the most needy mem-
bers of the clerical body. The fabrics arc to be em-
ployed for school purposes, among which infant
and evening schools are not forgotten. But large
and sweeping as is the change the interests of the
present inmates of these houses have been cared for.
Those who wish to continue a monastic life are to
receive a pension, which is to be augmented by one-
sixth if they resile out of the cloister. No more
novices are to be admitted.

Thus at one blow has fallen a system the mos'

pernicious to the interests of a civilised country
that can possibly be imagined. It is a fearful
thing to subtract a large proportion of the popula-
tion from the duties of civilised life, to cover their
laziness and pauperism with the veil of an assumed
sanctity, and suffer them to prey like locusts on
the very. vitals of the land. No heavier scourge
can be invented for a nation than the creation
within her of another nation of men and women,
vowed to celibacy, to idleness, and to uselessness,
who inflict upon her a double injury, not only by
what they consume without producing, but by
gathering around them a crowd of beggars more
lazy, more useless, and more hypocritical even than
themselves. In the days in which we live, what-
ever be a man's religious feelings or aspirations,
there is also
work for him to do, and the demand
for labour, physical and intellectual, still outstrips
the supply. It asceticism and seclusion were legi-
timate inferences from the doctrines of Christianity,
we might well tremble for the destinies of a faith
which set itself thus in opposition to the social
tendencies and progressive instincts of mankind.
If men are taught to regard the life of a monk or
nun as the highest of which human nature is
capable, their own sense will reject the conclusion,
and the result will be an indisposition to religion
altogether. We regard the mendicant friars and
inmates of religious houses in Italy as a standing
mission against Christianity—a mission all the more
perilous because, instead of openly attacking its
doctrines, it seems to reduce them to an absurdity.
11re rejoice to 4ce that the greater mildness of the
times in which we live, and the grater respect now
paid to the rights and feelings of individuals, have
secured for the inmates of religious houses in Naples
a very different treatment from that which was
accorded to such persons in England three centuries
ago. A cruel King and a greedy nobility could
not afford to wait for their prey, and turned out
helpless and homeless on the mercies of a world of
which they had become ignorant the aged inmates
of the nunnery and the monastery. History has
little to tell of their suffering ; but they were not
the less real nor the less deplorable. Nothing, as
we understand them, can be fairer than the propo-
sitions of the Piedmonteee Government with regard