The Life of Mazzini Part 8

"A low knock was heard at the door, and there he was in body and soul, the great magician, who struck the fancy of the people like a mythical hero. Our hearts leaped, and we went reverently to meet that great soul. He advanced with a child's frank courtesy and a divine smile, shaking hands like an Englishman, and addressing each of us by name, as if our names were written on our foreheads. He was not disguised; he wore cloth shoes, and a capote, and with his middle, upright stature, he looked like a philosopher, straight from his study, who never dreamed of troubling any police in the world." In the spring of 1869 he was eager for action, despite the failure of a plot, discouraged by himself, among the garrison at Milan. The remonstrances of the government procured his banishment from Switzerland, but he was back again in August, going "more sadly than usual, feeling physically and intellectually weaker and unequal to the task." He was suffering continuously, and confessed to his friends that he shrank from the effort. He was obviously going on from sheer inability to stop more than from any hope of success. "My new plan," he wrote gloomily, "may prove a dream like many others."

In the spring of 1870 he came again to Genoa to arrange the details.

The plot broke down like the rest, and at the moment everything was overshadowed by the coming Franco-German war. In common with the great majority of his countrymen, outside the court and government, his sympathies were with Germany. A German victory would avenge Mentana and compel the French to withdraw from Rome. In spite of his denunciation of the Prussian alliance in 1866, he had been for three years past carrying on a desultory intrigue with Bismarck. About the time of Mentana he had sent a note to Bismarck through their go-between. "I do not in the least," it said, "share Count Bismarck's political views; his method of unification does not command my sympathy; but I admire his tenacity and energy and independence towards the foreigner. I believe in German unity and desire it as much as that of my own country. I abhor the Empire and the supremacy it arrogates over Europe." He saw in the intrigue a chance of pushing his own schemes, and at the same time of preventing a Franco-Italian alliance against Germany. He asked Bismarck to send him arms and money, and promised, if he had them, to guarantee him against the hostile combination. Bismarck parleyed with him for a time, as he had parleyed with Garibaldi; and when war was imminent, and he knew that Victor Emmanuel and many of the Italian conservatives were trying again to commit the country to a French alliance, he promised that the arms and money should be sent. Mazzini hastened to accept, promising to attack Rome with the revolutionary forces, and undertaking to respect the wish of the country, should a future Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly declare for the monarchy. But Bismarck had learnt now that the danger of the hostile alliance had pa.s.sed, and the promised help never came.

The intrigue marks the last stage in Mazzini's political decline. That he had asked a foreign government to a.s.sist in what meant civil war, shows how the long years of conspiracy had distorted his moral vision.

He had intended to use Bismarck's money for a new plot, this time in Sicily. It was a fool's errand, and his friends tried in vain to dissuade him. But the monomania was on him, and he started for the island in disguise. As so often before, he had a traitor in his secrets, a man who with strange inconsistency had nursed him tenderly through an illness, while he was making a living by betraying his plans to the French police.[32] When Mazzini arrived by the Naples steamer at Palermo, he was arrested. He was taken to Gaeta and treated with all possible consideration. The very gaoler took three minutes to turn the noisy keys silently, that he might soften the sense of imprisonment. Here through the loopholes of the ma.s.sive fortress, where the Bourbons had made their last stand nine years before, he would watch the sea and sky, as he had done at Savona thirty-nine years ago. "The nights," he writes, "are very beautiful; the stars shine with a l.u.s.tre one only sees in Italy. I love them like sisters, and link them to the future in a thousand ways. If I could choose, I should like to live in absolute solitude, working at my historical book or at some other, just from a feeling of duty, and only wishing to see--for a moment, now and then,--some one I did not know, some poor woman that I could help, some working men I could advise, the doves of Zurich, and nothing else." He smoked indifferent cigars; he read bad translations of Shakespeare and Byron from the prison library, and, for want of better, Ta.s.so's _Gerusalemme_. He was planning again a book on Byron, and asks for Taine's critique of him in his _Litterature anglaise_. "Taine is a materialist writer, and certainly won't have an idea that squares with mine; but I am intellectually half-asleep and I reckon on the stimulus of contradiction and the irritation which I shall get out of his book. He has enough perverted intellectual power to wake me up."

He was released a few weeks later, after the capture of Rome, but he still refused to accept the amnesty, that he might keep his hands free, "without even the shadow of ungratefulness to anybody--even to a king." His one anxiety for the moment was to escape the popular demonstrations of sympathy, and get to a quiet life among his friends.

He pa.s.sed a restless night at Rome; it was twenty-one years since Margaret Fuller and Giulia Modena had persuaded the ex-Triumvir to save himself and fly. He went to Leghorn to his friends the Rossellis; thence to Genoa, to see his mother's tomb, and fled to escape the ovations, with his old sickness on him. "The only thing really touching to me," he wrote to England, "was in the churchyard--it was late--and the place was quite empty, but a keeper had, it seems, recognised me, and coming out of the gate, some poor people, a priest among them, were drawn up in a line, bowing and almost touching the earth. Not a smile, no attempt at absurd applause, they felt my sadness, and contrived to show they were sharing it."[33] The popular welcome had been dust and ashes to him; "even Swinburne's praise," he wrote from Gaeta, "makes me sad. Who am I, whom he praises?" His ideal was shattered. Rome had "the profanation of a corrupt and dishonoured monarchy," and he knew that the monarchy's winning of the capital meant that the republic would not come in his day. France, not Italy, had proclaimed the republic, and in a spirit that he hated. His own party had failed him. "Italy, my Italy," he said, "the Italy that I have preached, the Italy of our dreams? Italy, the great, the beautiful, the moral Italy of my heart? This medley of opportunists and cowards and little Macchiavellis, that let themselves be dragged behind the suggestion of the foreigner,--I thought to call up the soul of Italy, and I only see its corpse." "Yes, dear," he writes to Mrs Stansfeld, "I love more deeply than I thought my poor dreamt-of Italy, my old vision of Savona. I want to see, before dying, another Italy, the ideal of my soul and life, start up from her three hundred years'

grave: this is only the phantom, the mockery of Italy. And the thought haunts me, like the incomplete man in Frankenstein, seeking for a soul from its maker."

But henceforth he resigns conspiracy. Sometimes he still hoped for insurrection, still believed that "a month of action transforms a people more than ten years of being preached to"; but he knew that the republic was afar off, that all he could do now was quietly to educate his countrymen, especially the working cla.s.ses. "Tell the working-men of Genoa," so he sent his message, "that this is not a time for demonstrations but self-education. Germany is the only country that deserves a republic." He helped to organise the Friendly Societies; he advocated evening cla.s.ses for workmen, circulating popular libraries, the collection of a fund to a.s.sist societies for co-operative production; he founded a paper, _Roma del Popolo_, to spread his ideas. He still hoped to write his popular history on Italy and a book on national education,--hopes, alas, never fulfilled. He published _From the Council to G.o.d_, and was delighted at the success it met with in its English translation in the Fortnightly. He was keenly interested in the English movements for women's suffrage and against state regulation of vice. But his chief work in these last years was to fight the immature socialism of the time. He was bitterly chagrined by the "invasion of barbarians," which was threatening to conquer the Italian working-cla.s.ses to socialism or anarchism. The International had pa.s.sed out of its first stage as an organiser of trade-unionism, and was now the battle-ground between the anarchists under Bakounine and the collectivists, who followed Karl Marx. In its earlier days Mazzini had had some relations with it and Bakounine; he had advised his followers to join it, and had a high opinion of its English leaders, Odger and Cremer, "for their power of intellect and heart and their sincere devotion to the cause." He had tried to make it a political, revolutionary society; and when he found himself defeated by Marx' opposition, he retired. Since then, the International had turned to far other roads of revolution. Mazzini hardly distinguished between the two sections that were fighting for mastery in it, and banned indiscriminately the atheism and anarchism of the one and the socialism of the other. And in fact both were equally alien from his spiritual basis of life, his fervid faith in nationality, his more modest economic programme.[34] But he was careful to show that his criticism came from no lack of social aspiration. "Those, whom you call barbarians," he retorted on the Italian conservatives, who had used the word in a far other sense, "represent an idea,--the inevitable, destined rise of the men of Labour." The International, he argued, was the necessary fruit of middle-cla.s.s indifference to social reform; and the a.s.sembly at Versailles was more guilty than the Commune. He had, in fact, small liking for the Third Republic. A republic, which had only come for lack of an alternative, which had Thiers for its chief, and made no sign of restoring Nice, was a republic only in form. When he read Renan's _Reforme intellectuelle et morale_, it confirmed him in his distrust of France; and, almost on his death-bed, he reviewed the book in words of acute disappointment at its spirit.

The long life of fighting was fast closing in weariness and sense of failure. "This life of a machine, that writes and writes and writes for thirty-five years, begins to weigh upon me strangely." He had bitter personal chagrins; his one surviving sister refused to see him, from religious differences; Garibaldi would not be reconciled. All through the end of 1871 he was kept alive only by the devoted attention of Bertani, who looked after his patient as well as he had organised the Expedition of the Thousand. He still refused to accept the amnesty, and travelled under an a.s.sumed name to Pisa and Genoa and Florence, where he laid a wreath on Ugo Foscolo's tomb, for the bones of his hero had been lately brought from Chiswick to rest in Santa Croce. Giuditta Sidoli, "good, holy, constant Giuditta," died. "Did she die a Christian?" he enquires; "any faith, even though imperfect and spoilt by false doctrine, comforts the pillow of the dying better than the dry, thin, gloomy travesty of Science, which is called now-a-days Free Thought or Rationalism." He knew his own end was not far, and he was willing it should come. "Strange," he said, "that I see all those I loved go one by one, while I remain, I know not why."

His one care was that the work should still go on. "What matter," he wrote, "how many years or months I still live down here? Shall I love you less because I go elsewhere to work? Will you love me less, when you can only love me by working? I often think, that when at last I leave you, you will all work with more faith and ardour, to prevent my having lived in vain." In his last words to the working men of Italy he says, "love and work for this great, unhappy country of ours, called to high destinies, but stayed upon the road by those who cannot, will not know the road. This is the best way that you can have of loving me." One of his last acts was to repay an old loan of half a lifetime's standing. In the mild spring of 1872 he was living at a house that belonged to Pellegrino Rosselli, son-in-law of his old friends, the Nathans of Lugano, in the Via Maddalena at Pisa. People would watch the white-haired stranger, who went by the name of Brown, taking his daily walk, with the affectionate eyes and a kind word for every child. Early in March he was taken very ill and sank rapidly. On the 10th he died. His last conscious words were--"Believe in G.o.d? Yes, I do believe in G.o.d." He was buried, where he had always wished to lie, beside his mother, in the cemetery of Staglieno outside Genoa.

There, in the words of Carducci's epitaph, rests

L'UOMO CHE TUTTO SACRIFIC CHE AM TANTO E MOLTO COMPAT E NON ODI MAI.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] Otherwise ent.i.tled _A Letter to the Oec.u.menical Council_.

[32] I have some doubts, though, whether this Wolff is identical with the Wolff of the journey to Sicily. See _Lettere ad A. Giannelli_, 503.

[33] Will not some Italian artist paint the scene?

[34] See below, pp. 288, 289.

Chapter XIII

Religion

Religion essential to society--Paramouncy of the spiritual--Criticism of Christianity; Catholicism; Protestantism--Christ's teaching: its truths and imperfections--The doctrines of the new faith: G.o.d; Progress; Immortality--The criteria of Truth: the conscience; tradition--Humanity--The need of unity; authority; church and state; the new church.

Mazzini's life was one piece of almost perfect consistency and continuity. Save in minor points of policy, it had no turnings, no conversions, no recantations. Alike in theory and practice, it goes on its straight, undeviating course from his youthful literary essays to the full-bodied doctrine of _The Duties of Man_ and _From the Council to G.o.d_, from the first days of Young Italy to those of the Republican Alliance. And its magnificent unity comes of this, that all was dominated by a scheme of thought, that controlled and correlated each sphere of human action. Supremely he achieved the harmony of life, which he never wearied of extolling. He was politician, philosopher, religious reformer, literary critic; and every side of life completes the others in a perfect synthesis. At the centre of it all, controlling, illuminating, energizing, stands his religious faith. To him religion was "the eternal, essential, indwelling element of life,"

"the breath of humanity, its soul and life and consciousness and outward symbol," hallowing men's thoughts and actions, enn.o.bling, consoling, fortifying, the inspiring principle of brotherhood and social service. Deep in the conscience of each man, inseparable from life, lies the religious sense,--the sense of the Infinite and Imperishable, the aspiration to the Unknown and Invisible, the innate desire to apprehend G.o.d in his intellect and love. "If ever you have,"

he once said, "a strange moment of religious feeling, of supreme resignation, of quiet love of humanity, of a calm insight of duty, kneel down thankful, and treasure within yourself the feeling suddenly arisen. It is the feeling of life." And with the sense of the Divine, there comes to man the yearning to reach after the divine perfection and the importunate searching for the way. In every age, men have asked "to know, or at least to surmise, something of the starting-point and goal of mundane existence"; and religion comes to teach "the general principles that rule humanity, to sanction the link that makes men brothers in the consciousness of that one origin, one mission, one common aim." Man makes that mission and that aim his guiding star in all his strivings for the good; and in every branch of his activity he steers his course by his knowledge of G.o.d. "From the general formula, that men call religion, issues a rule of education, a basis of human brotherhood, a policy, a social economy, an art." It is impossible to keep it out of politics. It is there "in all questions of the franchise, of the condition of the ma.s.ses, of nationality,"--all intimately linked with the religious thought of the time, all part of G.o.d's providential scheme for man. "I do not know," he says, "speaking historically, a single great conquest of the human spirit, a single important step for the perfecting of human society, which has not had its roots in a strong religious faith." "No true society exists without a common faith and common purpose; politics are the application, religion gives the principle." Where this common faith is not, the mere will of the majority means permanent instability and the oppression of the rest; "without G.o.d, you can coerce, but you cannot persuade; you may be tyrants in your turn, but you cannot be educators or apostles."

Without religion, then,--deep, heartfelt, vitalising religion,--there can be no true community. Materialism had been tried, and had failed;--failed because it was "an individualist, cold, calculating doctrine, that slowly, infallibly extinguished every spark of high thinking or free life, that first plunged men into the worship of success, then made them slaves of triumphant violence and the accomplished fact." It killed enthusiasm in the individual; it killed true greatness in a nation. Bare ethics had been tried, "but no morality can endure or bring forth life, without a heaven and a dogma to support it." "No, man needs more than simple ethics; he craves to solve his doubts, to slake his thirsting for a future; he wants to know whence he comes and whither he goes." Men had tried philosophy, and indeed philosophy, that took humanity and not the individual for its study, was "the science of the law of life"; but by itself it was a barren rock, where life could find no resting-place. "Heresy is sacred," but only as the transient stage between a lower and a higher faith. Philosophy can "a.n.a.lyse and anatomise and dissect," but it has no breath of life to "decree duty or push men to deeds by giving ethics a new strength and grandeur." The needs of the age are less intellectual than spiritual. "What we want, what the people want, what the age is crying for, that it may find an issue from this slough of selfishness and doubt and negation, is a faith, a faith in which our souls may cease to err in search of individual ends, may march together in the knowledge of one origin, one law, one goal." And such a faith, and only such a faith, will give the solid, strong convictions and the energy and unity, by which alone society can be healed. "Any strong faith, that rises on the wreck of the old, exhausted creeds, will transform the existing social order, since every strong belief must needs apply itself to every branch of human activity; because always, in every age, earth has sought conformity with the heaven in which it believed; because all Humanity repeats under different formulas and in different degrees the words of the Lord's Prayer of Christendom: Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven."

Where shall this faith be found,--this living, vitalising faith, for which the age is groping, for want of which its aspiration and its efforts are in vain? Does Christianity supply it? Mazzini asked the question reverently and tenderly. Religion, he says, is above and independent of creeds, but every creed is sacred, for each has added to man's knowledge of G.o.d and of himself. However incomplete a faith, so it be a faith indeed, it helps to hallow life. He felt his a spiritual kinship more with Catholic priest and Protestant pastor, who lighted earth with broken rays of the divine, than with the sceptic, who would shut out G.o.d and immortality, enthusiasm and love.

Reverently, then, he tested Christianity. For the superstructures, indeed, that Catholics and Protestants had built upon the Christianity of Christ, he felt respect and sympathy, but little love. He had his special grievances against the Papacy for the evil work it had done in his own country, and he hated it, as only an Italian of his day could hate it. He held it to be irrevocably doomed: doomed, since the Reformation took the North from it;--doomed, "because it has betrayed its mission to protect the weak, because for three centuries and a half it has committed fornication with the princes of this world, because at the bidding of every evil and unbelieving government it has crucified Jesus afresh in the name of egoism,"--doomed, because it stood apart from the great humanitarian movements of the century, the freeing of Greece and Italy, the emanc.i.p.ation of the blacks;--doomed for the root sin, of which these were but consequences, that it had become "a phantasm of religion," "without faith or power or mission."

It had missed the meaning of Christ's teaching; it had sinned against the Holy Spirit, and there was no forgiveness for it. "G.o.d will provide for the abominated idolatry, G.o.d, who breaks all idols that were and are and shall be." Sometimes he was confident, that, before the century was out, the Papacy would be extinct. And yet, in spite of all, he respected what had been a great fact in the history of religion. Like every strong belief, it had in its time done high service for humanity, it had had its share of the n.o.ble and sublime and potent. "I remember it all and bow myself before your past." And die though it must, he would it should die n.o.bly, "like the sun in the great ocean," rejoicing that G.o.d's great design bade it make place for a more perfect faith.

For Protestantism his feeling was colder both in its sympathies and antipathies. His Catholic training, his craving for formal unity, made it difficult for him to read it sympathetically; and he saw it chiefly in its defects,--its exaggeration of the individual, its rejection of tradition, its sectarianism, its "indefinite dismembering of the common thought." He recognised somewhat, though imperfectly, the political and social work, which was indissolubly bound up with Puritanism; "'G.o.d and the People,'" he said in one of his letters to English working men, "were the inspirers of your Cromwell." As Catholicism had one side of the truth in its respect for tradition, so Protestantism had the other in its a.s.sertion of individual interpretation, and in this it had apprehended the essence of Christianity more truly than Catholicism had done. But though Protestants were slowly learning the value of tradition, the preeminence of Humanity over man, they still magnified the individual, till their creed had become a doctrine of material and spiritual selfishness, which must logically develop into pure materialism. He charged it with inspiring the inhumanity and anarchy of the _laissez-faire_ economy. It had made the salvation of the individual soul the end of life; and thus it had sundered religion from society, and dwarfed the all-embracing plan of G.o.d to the puny borders of a loveless pietism.

But when Mazzini pa.s.ses from Catholicism and Protestantism to Christ, his att.i.tude is one of infinite reverence and love. His close knowledge of the Gospels, his native kinship with their spirit, had brought him very near the mind of Christ, and he spoke of Him in beautiful and tender words. Christ's "was the soul most full of love, of holiest virtue, most inspired by G.o.d and by the Future, that men have ever hailed upon this earth." He "came for all; he spoke to all and for all. He lifted up the People and died for it." "I love Jesus,"

he once wrote in a private letter, "as the man who has loved the most all mankind, servants and masters, rich and poor, Brahmins and Helots or Parias." "In Jesus," so he wrote to the Oec.u.menical Council, "we worship the Founder of an age that freed the individual, the Apostle of the unity of law,--that law which he understood more fully than did any of the generations before him,--the Prophet of the equality of souls: and we bow ourselves before him, as the man who among all we know of loved the most, whose life, an unexampled harmony between thought and practice, proclaimed the holy doctrine of sacrifice, henceforth to be the everlasting foundation of all religion and all virtue; but we do not cancel the woman-born in G.o.d, we do not raise him where we cannot hope to join him; we would love him as the brother who was better than us all, not worship him and fear him as pitiless judge and intolerant tyrant of the future." In Christ's teaching he found many of the moral and social truths that were dearest to him.

"Does not every word of the Gospel breathe the spirit of liberty and equality, of that war with evil and injustice and falsehood, that inspires our work?" The cross was the symbol of "the one true immortal virtue, the sacrifice of self for others." "Unity of faith, love for one another, human brotherhood, activity in well-doing, the doctrine of sacrifice, the doctrine of equality, the abolition of aristocracy, the perfecting of the individual, liberty,--all are summed up in Christ's words, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy G.o.d and thy neighbour as thyself,' and 'Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant.'" Christ's teaching had inspired each struggle for truth from the Crusades to Lepanto, had destroyed feudalism, was destroying now the aristocracy of blood; Poles and Greeks had marched to freedom's battles under the flag of Jesus and His mother. And, above all, Christ gave the promise of indefinite religious progress,--a promise, which closed the mouths of those who would arbitrarily pin men to a fixed doctrine. 'The Spirit of truth shall abide with you for ever, ... and shall teach you all things.' "On the eve of his accepted sacrifice, when his mighty love for his brethren lit up the darkness of the future, he had sight of the continuous revelation of the Spirit through humanity." This was the 'eternal gospel' of the mystics of the middle ages; and Christ's promise stood true to-day. "G.o.d forgive you," he wrote to a Catholic friend, "you do not understand Christ,--Christ who died that humanity may some day free itself to rise to G.o.d by its own strength."

He paused anxiously before he declared himself no Christian. His temperament and outlook on life were essentially Christian; he tried to read new meanings into Christian doctrines; words of Christian prayer came naturally to his lips; Christmas Day was "sacred" to him.

Several times in early life he cherished schemes of reform within the church; for some years he doubted how far religious development could be built on Christian foundations, whether the new church would be "an application of Christianity" or "a religion to succeed" it. At all events Christian ethics would remain. "The morality of Christ is eternal; humanity will add to it, but will not take from it one word."

And for long yet Christianity would abide, the greatest of the creeds.

"This will reach you on Christmas Day," he wrote to an English friend.

"I am not a Christian, I belong to what I believe to be a still purer and higher Faith; but its time has not yet come; and until that day the Christian manifestation remains the most sacred revelation of the ever-onward progressing spirit of mankind."

But that its doctrine and its cult must some day pa.s.s, that its ethics needed supplementing, he had convinced himself, at all events as early as his Swiss days. He wasted little time in attacking particular articles of the Christian faith, for a.n.a.lytical criticism was always hateful to him. But he thought it had certain essential imperfections, because of which it failed, and was bound to fail to content the present reach of human knowledge or inspire men's activities. He charged it, firstly, with not sanctifying the things of earth. The church taught that the world was evil, life here an expiation, heaven the soul's true home. At one time he appealed against the church to Christ's own teaching, to texts that spoke of G.o.d's will being done on earth, of power given to Christ in earth, of the promise that the meek should inherit the earth. In later life he qualified this reading of the gospel. Jesus, "a soul blessed with such mighty love and perfect harmony between thought and action," could not fail to realise the harmony of earth and heaven. But "while he stood and stands alone, supreme over all other great religious reformers in everything that concerns the heart and affections, his intellectual grasp did not extend beyond the requirements of a single epoch." At the time in which he lived, he "saw no possible mission for the sake of the brethren whom he loved, save by moral regeneration, by creating a country of freemen and equals in heaven. He wished to show mankind how it could find salvation and redemption in spite of and in opposition to the world." Great Christian statesmen and thinkers of a later time,--Gregory VII. and Thomas Aquinas,--had tried to bring the temporal under the spiritual law. But they had failed, and the normal Christianity of the day was fatally divorced from religion and politics and art and science. It left the bigger part of life without G.o.d's law to guide it. It told men to renounce the world, when their duty was to live in it and battle in it and better it.

Christianity again came short, because it left out of ken the collective life of the race. The conception was an impossible one at the time in which Christ lived; and its absence maimed men's knowledge of G.o.d, and shortened their power to attain to the Divine Ideal.

Christianity pointed, indeed, to "salvation, that is perfection"; but it recognised no instrument beyond "the weak, unequal, isolated, ineffective strength of the individual." Mazzini's criticism came to this: Christianity tells each man to perfect himself by his own strength and G.o.d's; but his spiritual growth is conditioned by the growth of the men around him, and therefore his own perfecting depends on the progress of the race, the common search for good, that links all men together and the generations to one another. Mazzini always regarded the French Revolution as the political expression, the "daughter" of Christianity, and there the depreciation of the race, the exaggeration of the individual had borne their necessary fruit of moral selfishness and social anarchy. Yet again, though Christ had promised the continuous teaching of his Spirit, ever leading to new truth, the doctrine of redemption was inconsistent with any theory of progress. There was no Fall; man had begun at the bottom and had been tending upwards ever since. Salvation was for men, not from a single, isolated act, but from the slow, unceasing, inevitable working of the providential scheme. The individual came nearer the divine, not by faith in Christ's sacrifice, but by his own works, by sacrifice of self, by faith in the "ideal that every man is called to incarnate in himself." And because of these imperfections in its theory of life, Christianity had ceased to be a vitalising force. For some it had become an ethical system, for others a philosophy, while men needed a religion. Politics and art and science had gone their own ways.

Christian morality knew not patriotism. Charity was its only remedy for social wrongs, and charity was impotent to stop the springs of poverty. Men gave lip-service to Christ's teaching, but it had no binding influence on their lives. It offered no solution for their perplexities; it was no longer a faith that could move mountains or remould the modern world. Its day had gone, and all the efforts of neo-Christians or Christian Socialists or Old Catholics to make it answer to modern needs were bound to fail, as the neo-Platonists had failed in their day to galvanise paganism. "Jesus warned you, when on earth," he said to "the Anglo-Saxon Christian Socialists," "that you cannot put new wine into old bottles."

Such was Mazzini's criticism of Christianity, not always consistent with itself, sometimes confounding Christ's thought with others'

perversions of it, sometimes failing to recognise how many-sided a phenomenon is Christianity, sometimes inaccurately tracing its actual results in history and modern life. His att.i.tude towards it may be summed up thus. He retained its belief in the omnipotence of the spiritual; its faith in G.o.d and in His providential working; its supreme veneration for the character and moral teaching of Jesus; its insistence on moral perfection and not material interest as the end of life; its call to love and sacrifice of self; its belief in immortality; its aspiration to the Church Universal. He rejected the divinity of Christ, the doctrine of a mediator, the antagonism between matter and spirit and the consequent neglect of the things of earth; its inability to grasp G.o.d's law of progress; its non-acceptance (though the Church had partially recognised it) of Humanity as the interpreter of that law.

But the new faith, which was to grow out of and supplement Christianity, must have its doctrines too, its positive basis of belief. "There is no life in the void. Life is faith in something, a system of secure beliefs, grounded on an immutable foundation, which defines the end, the destiny of man, and embraces all his faculties to point them to that end." Mankind, he said, is weary of negations, of the hustling conflict of opinions. "We must prepare for it an abode for the day of rest,--something on earth, where it may lay its weary head,--something in heaven on which its eyes may stay,--a tent to shield it from the storm, a spring to quench its thirst in the vast unbounded desert where it travels." Dogma is essential; it is ever "sovereign over practical morality," for "morality is only its consequence, its application, its translation into practice." By dogma he meant "a body of ideas, which, starting from a fixed point, embraces all human faculties and employs them for the conquest of a positive, practical end, which is for the good of the majority; the exposition of a principle and its consequences in relation to life's manifestation and operations in the moral and the industrial world, both for the individual and for society." The thinker apprehends it, science and society prepare the medium for its adoption, the best and wisest incarnate it in their lives, then it "enters the soul of the many and becomes a religious axiom." In other words it is an ethical and political system, so based on the eternal verities of life, so penetrated by the spiritual sense of the race, that it ceases to be a cold and abstract code, and takes the warmth and colour of religion, compelling men's souls and pushing them irresistibly to social duty.

What then is the body of doctrine for the Church of the future, as Mazzini conceived it? First, as the root of all, belief in G.o.d, "the author of all existence, the living, absolute thought, of which our world is a ray and the universe an incarnation"; "a sphere inviolable, eternal, supreme over all humanity, independent of chance or error or blind and interrupted operation." G.o.d, then, exists objectively, as maker and ruler of the universe. Man discovers G.o.d; he does not create Him. In his criticism of Renan, Mazzini attacks any theory of the subjectivity of the Divine. Pantheism (that is, the "materialist pantheism" of Spinoza, not the "spiritual pantheism" of St Paul and Wordsworth and Sh.e.l.ley) confounds subject and object, good and evil, and leaves no place for Providence or human liberty; it is a "philosophy of the squirrel in the cage," condemning mankind to go for ever rotating in a circle. Deism is a "sordid" creed, which relegates G.o.d to heaven and ignores his ever-operating life in creation. Mazzini gives no clue how he would have reconciled an all-creating Deity,--author therefore of good and evil,--with a beneficent and loving Providence.

He finds the proofs of an actual, objective G.o.d, first, in man himself, in the universal intuition of the Divine. "G.o.d exists. G.o.d lives in our conscience, in the conscience of Humanity, in the Universe around us. Our conscience calls to him in our most solemn moments of sorrow and joy. He who would deny G.o.d before a starry night, before the graves of his dearest ones, before the martyr's scaffold, is a very wretched or a very guilty man." The fact that we aspire to the best and infinite proves that there is a best and infinite, that is G.o.d. And, next, the fact of existence bears witness to an intelligent creator. "G.o.d exists because we exist." "Call it G.o.d or what you like," he once said, "there is life which we have not created, but which is given." "The Universe displays him in its order and harmony, in the intelligent design shown in its working and its law." And this law is "one and immutable." "Everything is preordained"; "G.o.d and law are identical terms"; "'chance' has no meaning, and was only invented to express man's ignorance." "There can be no miracle, nothing supernatural, no possible violation of the laws that rule the Universe"; though he realised how big is the unknown of nature, and his rejection of the supernatural did not prevent him from being a mystic. But G.o.d is not only intellect but love, not only Lord but Educator. His law embraces Humanity as well as nature, the moral as well as the physical world. He manifests himself "in the intelligent design, that regulates the life of Humanity" and leads man ever upwards towards perfection. "Everything, from the grain of sand to the plant, from the plant to Man, has its own law; how then can Humanity be without its law?"

Mazzini seems to have recognised the difficulty of reconciling the oneness and eternity of law with an ever-active Providence, which concerned itself, for instance, with present-day problems of democracy and nationality. He found a solution in making the law consist in an inevitable tendency to progress, both in the material and, still more, in the spiritual world. The law of Progress, which perhaps he developed from Lessing, is "a supreme formula of the creative activity, eternal, omnipotent, universal as itself." His 'Progress' is not equivalent to 'evolution.' He formulated it, of course, before Darwin's day; so far as I know, he never refers to Darwinism, and probably never studied it. If he had, it would certainly have been to condemn it. But he would have attacked it, not from the scientific side, but on _a priori_ grounds. Progress, he would have said, rules the material world, but it rules it through the spiritual, by virtue of an inherent G.o.d-implanted tendency and the operation of the human will. He would have rejected as derogatory to the divine idea an evolution, which results from the struggle of unthinking and non-moral forces. He condemned unsparingly, as we shall see, the explanation of social facts by the bare brute struggle of individuals or the development of material phenomena. Progress is essentially a moral phenomenon, and postulates the search, not for self, but for self-sacrifice. It is "the slow, but necessary, inevitable development of every germ of good, of every holy idea." Sometimes, indeed, he is trapped by the ambiguity of 'self-realisation,' and speaks of "the instinct and necessity, which urges every living being to the fuller development of all the germs, the faculties, the forces, the life within it." But it is clear that he is always really thinking of the development of good alone. G.o.d's plan "slowly, progressively makes man divine." Whither Humanity ultimately goes, we know not; but we know there is no limit to the march; and every age, every religion, each new philosophy enlarges its apprehension of the end.

He curiously dovetails personal immortality into the doctrine. For the individual soul the process of perfecting goes on beyond the limits of this world. Life "here-down" (as he called it in English) is so short, so full of imperfection, that the soul cannot in its earthly pilgrimage climb the ladder that leads to G.o.d. And yet intuition and tradition tell us that the ideal will be reached some day, somewhere; in words, that almost suggest that he had read the parallel pa.s.sage in Wordsworth, he speaks of memory as the consciousness of the soul's progress up from earlier existences; love would be a mockery, if it did not last beyond the grave; the unity of the race implies a link between the living and the dead; science teaches there is no death but only transformation. He held pa.s.sionately to his faith in immortality, and he believed that the dear ones he had lost were watching over him and bringing his best aspirations. The individual soul, he thought, progresses through a series of re-incarnations, each leading it to a more perfect development, and the rapidity of its advance depends on its own purification. And as the individual has his progress through a series of existences, so collective man progresses ever through the human generations. "No, G.o.d eternal, thy word is not all spoken, thy thought not yet revealed in all its fulness. It still creates, and will create through long ages beyond the grasp of human reckoning. The ages, that are past, have revealed but fragments to us. Our mission is not finished. We hardly know its source, we do not know its final end; time and our discoveries only extend its borders. From age to age it ascends to destinies unknown to us, seeking its own law, of which we read but a few lines. From initiative to initiative, through the series of thy progressive incarnations, it purifies and extends the formula of Sacrifice; it feels for its own way; it learns thy faith, eternally progressive." If once we recognised this progressive evolution of religion and morals, there would be no room for pure scepticism; we should see that an expired form of faith is not wrong but imperfect, that it needs not destroying but supplementing. "Every religion instils into the human soul one more drop of the universal life."

But does not this mean fatalism,--the same fatalism, with which he charged the Christian doctrine of redemption, the fatalism, with which he would have charged the evolutionists, had he known them? If the progress of humanity is preordained, what need for man to use his puny powers? Mazzini met the difficulty thus. True, evil cannot permanently triumph, G.o.d's progress must go on; but its quicker or slower realisation is in our hands. "The slow unfolding of history proceeds under the continuous action of two factors, the work of individuals and the providential scheme. Time and s.p.a.ce are ours; we can quicken progress or r.e.t.a.r.d it, we cannot stop it." And this, because progress, being essentially a moral phenomenon, must be realised in the world of thought and will, before it can be translated into practice. Mazzini did not seriously concern himself with the metaphysics of determinism; he took the common-sense position that the will is free; "no philosophic sophisms," he said, "can cancel the testimony of remorse and martyrdom." It depends on a man's choice of good or evil, whether he approaches nearer the ideal in himself, and therefore whether, so far as his influence lies, progress is realised in society. Thus, in his strained and inconclusive argument, G.o.d's providential working is reconciled both with human free will and the oneness of law.

Progress, then!--onwards to the great Ideal, the ideal which "stands in G.o.d, outside and independent of ourselves," which as yet we know but darkly, but which every generation sees more clearly; fixed, therefore, and "absolute in the Divine Idea," but gradually revealed to man, "approached" but never "reached" in this life, ever provisional and shifting for us as knowledge grows. The world is no mere necessary sequence of material phenomena, but a spiritual stream, that, swift or sluggish be its course, flows irresistibly to G.o.d. The existing fact is not the law; choice between good and evil, heroism, sacrifice are not illusions; conscience, the intuition of the ideal, the power of will, and moral force are ultimate and mastering spiritual facts. The divine design controls it all, and man has liberty to help G.o.d's plan. And he who knows this, knows that "a supreme power guards the road, by which believers journey towards their goal," and he will be "bold with G.o.d through G.o.d." The crusaders' cry 'G.o.d wills it' is for him, and his are the courage and consistency and power of sacrifice, that come to those who know they battle on the side of G.o.d. It was this conviction that Mazzini wished his followers to have, when he pleaded that Young Italy should be as a religion. For "political parties fall and die; religious parties never die till they have conquered."

But how shall man search for the ideal, how learn the providential design? Mazzini has his answer clear: "tradition and conscience,"[35]

or, as we may translate them, experience and intuition, "are the two wings given to the human soul to reach to truth." First, then, the individual consciousness and that in a two-fold sense. Truth is truth only to the individual, when he apprehends it for himself. Sometimes Mazzini speaks as if he accepted the whole Protestant doctrine of individual judgment, and in a sense he does. Each man must prove by his own consciousness every interpretation of G.o.d's law, whether it be true or not. But this gift of judgment only comes by righteousness.

"In moments of holy thought something of the great flood of man's knowledge of G.o.d's law may come to every man." To learn it, he must "purify himself from low pa.s.sion, from every guilty inclination, from every idolatrous superst.i.tion"; and truth will come "in the most secret aspirations of the soul, in the instincts of itself, that hover round in supreme hours of affection and devotion." But, though Mazzini does not very clearly distinguish, he seems generally to be thinking of something more. It is for the consciousness not only to apprehend and appropriate for the individual truths already known to the race, but sometimes it is its privilege to spell a new line of G.o.d's law.

Glimpses of new truth may come to the collective intuition of a people. There are times, when "the spirit of G.o.d descends upon the gathered mult.i.tudes," and _vox populi_ is _vox Dei_. He would deny the right of spiritual discovery to a people enslaved by low, material impulses; but in a nation moved by some great aspiration, when thought strikes thought, and enthusiasm kindles enthusiasm, there truth will probably be found. But though in such times of faith and struggle the people has its "great collective intuitions," though sometimes "the pale, modest star that G.o.d has placed in simple bosoms" comes nearer truth than genius comes, it is normally for the best and wisest to discover truth. Only men of holy lives and genius are G.o.d's "born interpreters"; his apostles, those "who love their brethren most and are ready to suffer for their love, and those on whom G.o.d has bestowed surpa.s.sing gifts of intellect, provided that their intellect is virtuous and desires the good." But even such as these can find truth only by interrogating the dim silent workings of the people's mind. Light comes to no man by his own unaided effort; and the solitary thinker may mistake his own conceit for truth. "Great men can only spring from a great people, just as an oak, however high it may tower above every other tree in the forest, depends on the soil whence it derives its nourishment. The soil must be enriched by countless decaying leaves."

But the untested intuition, whether of man of genius or people, is by itself no sufficient criterion of truth. Every heresy has its martyrs.

There is a more unerring interpreter of G.o.d's law, known imperfectly to Catholicism, but neglected by Protestantism and the individualist schools of the day,--the consciousness of the race, checked and corrected and perfected by each succeeding generation, the "common consensus of humanity," "the tradition, not of one school or one religion or one age, but of all the schools and all religions and all the ages in their succession," for "no one man or people or school can presume to discover all the law of G.o.d." The seeker after truth will find it most surely in "the severe study of the universal tradition, which is life's manifestation in Humanity." Humanity (the conception of which he seems to have derived from Vico and Herder), "the living word of G.o.d," "the collective and continuous being," is "the only interpreter of G.o.d's law." "Humanity," said a thinker of the last century,[36] "is a man who is ever learning. Individuals die; but the truth they thought, the good they wrought, is not lost with them; Humanity garners it, and the men who walk over their graves, have their profit from it. Each of us is born to-day in an atmosphere of ideas and beliefs, that are the work of all Humanity before us; each of us brings unconsciously some element, more or less valuable, for the life of Humanity that comes after. The education of Humanity grows like those Eastern pyramids, to which each pa.s.ser-by adds his stone.

We pa.s.s, the travellers of a day, called away to complete our individual education elsewhere; the education of Humanity shines by flashes in each one of us, but unveils its full radiance slowly, progressively, continuously in Humanity. From one task to another, from one faith to another, step by step Humanity conquers a clearer vision of its life, its mission, of G.o.d and of his law." And here again comes strength. "It matters little," he replied to Carlyle, "that _our_ individual powers be of the smallest amount in relation to the object to be attained; we know that the powers of millions of men, our brethren, will succeed to the work after us, in the same track,--we know that the object attained, be it when it may, will be the result of _all_ our efforts combined." But he who would have this strength, must needs respect Humanity's tradition, must recognise that the race is more likely to be right than his own poor intellect. He turned angrily on the "barbarian" schools, that would sweep away the past, and create Humanity anew on some arbitrary plan. Humanity spurns builders of utopias; and preachers of new principles, the ma.s.ses fervent for some new idea, must prove their beliefs by the infallible test of tradition. Mazzini hardly recognised how difficult and vague and diverse might be the detailed interpretation of tradition, and he was never very modest in making his own inductions. He believed that history proves that there are certain "immortal elements of human nature,"--education, fatherland, liberty, a.s.sociation, family, property, religion; and the theorist, who offends any one of these, is in conflict with G.o.d's law. In the conjunction, then, of these two criteria and no otherwise stands the discovery of the truth. Neither suffices without the other; and therefore Catholicism and Protestantism, each of which had apprehended one alone, are incomplete. Tradition by itself leads to stagnation; intuition alone to chance and anarchy. But "where you find the general permanent voice of humanity agreeing with the voice of your conscience, be sure that you hold in your grasp something with absolute truth,--gained and for ever yours."

It will be noted that Mazzini parts himself from the intuitive school, when he admits experience as the surer criterion of truth, when, again, he says that the intellect is necessary to verify the instincts of consciousness. On the other hand he is a pure intuitionist in his conception of the function of genius, for genius meant with him something other far than 'the infinite capacity of taking pains'; it was a G.o.d-given, almost mystical faculty, that saw truth by its own natural, unaided light, that possessed her forcibly, not wooed her timidly. He is an intuitionist again when he holds, as obviously he does hold, that it is for the pure in heart to see G.o.d, that religious and ethical enquiry depends for its results on the cultivation of the moral sense, and therefore more on the moral than on the intellectual development of the enquirer. And, even when he sides with the opposite school, it does not mean that he trusts to any scientific process of ratiocination. He has more confidence in the unconscious reasoning, by which the race has gathered its experience, and which allows no room for the errors of the solitary thinker. He did not neglect metaphysics, but he was little influenced by them, and he would have sided with 'the vulgar' against 'the philosophers.'

Mazzini's conception of Humanity was essentially related to his craving for religious and moral unity. Fighter though he was ever, and recognising somewhat the value of "the holy conflict of ideas," he did not see how much in an imperfect age progress depends upon the clash of creeds and conflict of opinions. He was so weary of debate, so confident that others must come to the same truth that he had. As far as humanity had learnt G.o.d's law, all should bow to it; and he looked to a true national education to generate this unity of faith. As unity was the law of G.o.d's universe, so unity was the condition of humanity's advance. Without it "there may be movement, but it is not uniform or concentrated." Therefore "the world thirsts for unity,"

"democracy tends to unity," and every great religion must of necessity strive to be catholic. But now "discord is everywhere,"--creeds that curse one another, warring states, cla.s.s hatreds, party bitterness, the search for truth itself a source of conflict. It is time to end this wasteful strife, and march together, "reverently seeking the future city, a new heaven and a new earth, which may unite in one, in love of G.o.d and man, in faith in a common aim, all those, who tossed between fears of the present and doubtings of the future, now stray in intellectual and moral anarchy." "We must found moral unity, the Catholicism of humanity," "the unity of belief that Christ promised for all peoples," "a unity which binds the sects in one sole people of believers, and on the churches and conventicles and chapels raises the great temple, Humanity's Pantheon to G.o.d."