the remarkable and admirable pamphlet which has lately issued from the
pen of Mr. Mazzini.[3] I have the pleasure of knowing excellent Roman
Catholics; I have suffered in behalf of their emancipation, and would do
so again to-morrow; but I believe that if even their external form of
Christianity has any chance of survival three hundred years hence, it
will have been owing to the appearance meanwhile of some extraordinary
man in power, who, in the teeth of worldly interests, or rather in
charitable and sage inclusion of them, shall have proclaimed that the
time had arrived for living in the flower of Christian charity, instead
of the husks and thorns which may have been necessary to guard it. If it
were possible for some new and wonderful Pope to make this change, and
draw a line between these two Christian epochs, like that between the
Old and New Testaments, the world would feel inclined to prostrate
itself again and for ever at the feet of Rome. In a catholic state
of things like that, delighted should I be, for one, to be among the
humblest of its communicants. How beautiful would their organs be then!
how ascending to an unperplexing Heaven their incense! how unselfish
their salvation! how intelligible their talk about justice and love! It
would be far more easy, however, for the Church of England to do this
than the Church of Rome; since the former would not feel itself hampered
with pretensions to infallibility. A Church once reformed, may reform
itself again and again, till it remove every blemish in the way of its
perfection. And God grant this may be the lot of the Church of my native
country. Its beautiful old ivied places of worship would then want
no harmony of accordance with its gentle and tranquil scenery; no
completeness of attraction to the reflecting and the kind.

But if Charity (and by Charity I do not mean mere toleration, or any
other pretended right to permit others to have eyes like ourselves, but
whatever the delightful Greek word implies of good and lovely), if this