3 16
ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
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 o\vn, 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 \vith her interests; and the \vrongs 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 \vithout inconsistency, and doubt- less would without hesitation, subscribe to almost every word in Döllinger's work; but in the position they have taken they \vould 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 ROine, a court-like prelate observed that this admiration for Truth did her honour, as it was seldom shared by persons in her station. " That," said the Queen, "is because truths are not all made of marble." Men are seldom zealous for an idea in which they do not perceive some reflection of them- selves, in which they have not embarked some portion of their individuality, or which they cannot connect with some subjective purpose of their own. It is often more easy to sympathise \vith a person in whose opposite views we discern a weakness corresponding to our own, than with one who unsympathetically avoids to colour the
