Latter-Day Pamphlets | Page 4

men it was very clear how this poor devoted Pope would prosper, with
his New Testament in his band. An alarming business, that of
governing in the throne of St. Peter by the rule of veracity! By the rule
of veracity, the so-called throne of St. Peter was openly declared, above
three hundred years, ago, to be a falsity, a huge mistake, a pestilent
dead carcass, which this Sun was weary of. More than three hundred
years ago, the throne of St. Peter received peremptory judicial notice to
quit; authentic order, registered in Heaven's chancery and since legible
in the hearts of all brave men, to take itself away,--to begone, and let us
have no more to do with it and its delusions and impious
deliriums;--and it has been sitting every day since, it may depend upon
it, at its own peril withal, and will have to pay exact damages yet for
every day it has so sat. Law of veracity? What this Popedom had to do
by the law of veracity, was to give up its own foul galvanic life, an
offence to gods and men; honestly to die, and get itself buried.
Far from this was the thing the poor Pope undertook in regard to
it;--and yet, on the whole, it was essentially this too. "Reforming
Pope?" said one of our acquaintance, often in those weeks, "Was there
ever such a miracle? About to break up that huge imposthume too, by
'curing' it? Turgot and Necker were nothing to this. God is great; and
when a scandal is to end, brings some devoted man to take charge of it
in hope, not in despair!"--But cannot he reform? asked many simple
persons;--to whom our friend in grim banter would reply: "Reform a
Popedom,--hardly. A wretched old kettle, ruined from top to bottom,
and consisting mainly now of foul grime and _rust_: stop the holes of it,
as your antecessors have been doing, with temporary putty, it may hang
together yet a while; begin to hammer at it, solder at it, to what you call
mend and rectify it,--it will fall to sherds, as sure as rust is rust; go all
into nameless dissolution,--and the fat in the fire will be a thing worth
looking at, poor Pope!"--So accordingly it has proved. The poor Pope,
amid felicitations and tar-barrels of various kinds, went on joyfully for

a season: but he had awakened, he as no other man could do, the
sleeping elements; mothers of the whirlwinds, conflagrations,
earthquakes. Questions not very soluble at present, were even sages and
heroes set to solve them, began everywhere with new emphasis to be
asked. Questions which all official men wished, and almost hoped, to
postpone till Doomsday. Doomsday itself had come; that was the
terrible truth!
For, sure enough, if once the law of veracity be acknowledged as the
rule for human things, there will not anywhere be want of work for the
reformer; in very few places do human things adhere quite closely to
that law! Here was the Papa of Christendom proclaiming that such was
actually the case;--whereupon all over Christendom such results as we
have seen. The Sicilians, I think, were the first notable body that set
about applying this new strange rule sanctioned by the general Father;
they said to themselves, We do not by the law of veracity belong to
Naples and these Neapolitan Officials; we will, by favor of Heaven and
the Pope, be free of these. Fighting ensued; insurrection, fiercely
maintained in the Sicilian Cities; with much bloodshed, much tumult
and loud noise, vociferation extending through all newspapers and
countries. The effect of this, carried abroad by newspapers and rumor,
was great in all places; greatest perhaps in Paris, which for sixty years
past has been the City of Insurrections. The French People had plumed
themselves on being, whatever else they were not, at least the chosen
"soldiers of liberty," who took the lead of all creatures in that pursuit, at
least; and had become, as their orators, editors and litterateurs
diligently taught them, a People whose bayonets were sacred, a kind of
Messiah People, saving a blind world in its own despite, and earning
for themselves a terrestrial and even celestial glory very considerable
indeed. And here were the wretched down-trodden populations of
Sicily risen to rival them, and threatening to take the trade out of their
hand.
No doubt of it, this hearing continually of the very Pope's glory as a
Reformer, of the very Sicilians fighting divinely for liberty behind
barricades,--must have bitterly aggravated the feeling of every
Frenchman, as he looked around him, at home, on a Louis-Philippism
which had become the scorn of all the world. "_Ichabod_; is the glory
departing from us? Under the sun is nothing baser, by all accounts