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men, and whose Popes speak in the name of the Shepherd of human- ity. It is one side of the alternative with which Europe has long since been confronted. "There are only two ways between which we have to choose the road to Rome and the road to atheism" wrote Cardinal Newman. The same discovery had previously been made in the opposite camp. "There is," said Fichte, "no third possibility: one must either cast oneself into the lap of the Roman Church which alone can save, or one must become a determined Freethinker."
The Papal office is today the same as it always was and its antagonists have hardly changed their masks, let alone their thoughts. But they have refined their methods. In the shadow of St. Peter's an example of a totalitarian state suddenly loomed up. The external similarity of Fascism with the organizatorial style of the Catholic Church, and even more certainly the usurpation of the religious energies of the soul for the purposes of the state and the race, would, if both sides drew the final conclusions from their principles, lead to an antagonism so sharp and deep that compared with it the struggles between Popes and Emperors of the Middle Ages would seem like mere episodes of a quarrel between Christians. Meanwhile however, the outer trend of events veils the reality of contrasted principles. The Lateran Treaties of 1929, which brought the Papacy a solution of the Roman question in accordance with the modest requests of Leo XIII in 1894, freed the Vatican from a situation that was physically disadvantageous, and at the same time gave the Fascist government of Italy a new free- dom of action against this wholly surrounded little state. It can main- tain before the world that this was a deed of generosity, even of friendli- ness; but at the same time it can treat the activities of the Vatican sovereign within the limits of Italy as an expression of or an interference by an "outside" alien political power. The two souls of Eternal Rome have been divorced and live on as oppositcs under the roof of a Con- cordat.
The political antagonists of the Papacy all carry the banners of an intcllectualist opposition. Though the words inscribed on those banners may be different, there is a unanimous agreement in so far as opposition to Rome is concerned. It is not necessary to list them all the historical animosity of the other Christian confessions, the resentment of the ultra-nationalists, the fervour of those who put
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