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ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
terrestrial bonds, he has no relatives, no favourites to provide for. For him the rights and powers of his office exis_t only for the sake of its duties. . . . Grievously outraged, injured, rewarded with ingratitude, he has never harboured a thought of revenge, never committed an act of severity, but ever forgiven and ever pardoned. The cup of sweetness and of bitterness, the cup of human favour and of human aversion, he has not only tasted, but emptied to the dregs; he heard them cry" Hosannah !" and soon after" Crucifige !" The man of his confidence, the first intellectual power of his nation, fell beneath the murderer's knife; the bullet of an insurgent struck down the friend by his side. And yet no feeling of hatred, no breath of anger could ever obscure, even for a moment, the spotless Inirror of his soul. Untouched by human folly, unn10ved by human malice, he proceeds with a firm and regular step on his way, like the stars of heaven. Such I have seen the action of this Pope in Ronle, such it has been described to me by all, whether near him or afar; and if he now seenlS to be appointed to pass through all the painful and discouraging experience which can befall a monarch, and to continue to the end the course of a prolonged martyrdom, he resembles in this, as in so many other things, the sixteenth Louis; or rather; to go up higher, he knows that the disciple is not above the Master, and that the pastor of a church, whose Lord and Founder died upon the cross, cannot wonder and cannot refuse that the cross should bè laid also opon him (pp. 624-627).
I t is a common opinion, that the Pope, as a sovereign, is bound by the common la\v to the forms and ideas of the Middle Ages; and that in consequence of the progress of society, of the difference between the thirteenth century and the nineteenth, there is an irreconcilable discord bet\veen the Papacy and the necessities of civil govern- ment. All Catholics are bound to oppose this opinion. Only that which is of Divine institution is unchangeable through all time. But the sovereignty of the Popes is extremely elastic, and has already gone through many forms. No contrast can be stronger than that between the use which the Popès made of their power in the thirteenth or the fifteenth century, and the system of Consalvi. rfhere is no reason, therefore, to doubt, that it \vill now, after a violent interruption, assume the form best adapted to the character of the age and the requirements of the I talian people. There is nothing chimerical in the vision of a new order of things, in which the election
