The Florentine postulates religion as an essential element in a strong
and stable State. Perhaps, with Gibbon, he deemed it useful to the
Magistrate. But his science is impersonal. He will not tolerate a Church
that poaches on his political preserves. Good dogma makes bad politics.
It must not tamper with liberty or security. And most certainly, with
Dante, in the _Paradiso_, he would either have transformed or omitted
the third Beatitude, that the Meek shall inherit the earth. With such a
temperament, Machiavelli must ever keep touch with sanity. It was not
for him as for Aristotle to imagine what an ideal State should be, but
rather to inquire what States actually were and what they might actually
become. He seeks first and foremost 'the use that may be derived from
history in politics'; not from its incidents but from its general
principles. His darling model of a State is to be found where Dante
found it, in the Roman Republic. The memory and even the substance of
Dante occur again and again. But Dante's inspiration was spiritual:
Machiavelli's frankly pagan, and with the latter Fortune takes the place
of God. Dante did not love the Papacy, but Machiavelli, pointing out how
even in ancient Rome religion was politic or utilitarian, leads up to
his famous attack upon the Roman Church, to which he attributes all the
shame and losses, political, social, moral, national, that Italy has
suffered at her hands. And now for the first time the necessity for
Italian Unity is laid plainly down, and the Church and its temporal
power denounced as the central obstacles. In religion itself the
Secretary saw much merit. 'But when it is an absolute question of the
welfare of our country, then justice or injustice, mercy or cruelty,
praise or ignominy, must be set aside, and we must seek alone whatever
course may preserve the existence and liberty of the state.' Throughout
the _Discorsi_, Machiavelli in a looser and more expansive form,
suggests, discusses, or re-affirms the ideas of _The Prince_. There is
the same absence of judgment on the moral value of individual conduct;