The Two Types of Religion in Rome.

Only three or four blocks from our hotel stands the Church of the Cappuccini, which contains one of the most gruesome sights in Rome, the celebrated cemetery of the Cappuccini monks, the soil of which was brought from Jerusalem. All Roman Catholic cemeteries have a peculiarly melancholy aspect. They have none of that gentle beauty which is so characteristic of our cemeteries, where the grass grows green under the open sky or great trees cast their peaceful shade over "God's acre." But this is the most weird and ghastly of them all. There are four recesses or chapels underneath the church, the pillars and pilasters of which are made of thigh-bones and skulls, the architectural ornaments being represented by the joints of the spine, and the more delicate tracery by the smaller bones of the human frame. "The summits of the arches are adorned with entire skeletons, looking as if they were wrought most skillfully in bas-relief. There is no possibility of describing how ugly and grotesque is the effect.... On some of the skulls there are inscriptions, purporting that such a monk, who formerly made use of that particular head-piece, died on such a day and year; but vastly the greater number are piled up undistinguishably into the architectural design.... In the side walls of the vaults are niches where skeleton monks sit or stand, clad in the brown habits that they wore in life.... Yet let us give the cemetery the praise that it deserves. There is no disagreeable scent, such as might have been expected from the decay of so many holy persons, in whatever odor of sanctity they may have taken their departure. The same number of living monks would not smell half so unexceptionably." So Hawthorne says, and I have spared my readers the most disagreeable parts of his description.

The allusion in his last sentence is one which is justified by the olfactory organs of every visitor to Rome. The vices which were encouraged in the magnificent baths of the emperors, and which have given the word bagnio an evil signification the world over, "found their reaction in the impression of the early Christians that uncleanliness was a virtue, an impression which is retained by several of the monastic orders to the present day." We sometimes weary of the superabundant advertisements of the different kinds of soap in the advertising pages of our monthly magazines. But what a wholesome sign it is! And what a difference it marks between us and the average Italian! And what a field for their business would be opened to Mr. Pears and the rest if only the monks would adopt the view that "cleanliness is next to godliness," and that, therefore, soap might be regarded as a sort of means of grace!

Mark Twain once described what he would say, if he were a native of Italy, and had been on a visit to the United States, and had come back to the Campagna for the purpose of telling his Italian countrymen what he had seen in America: "One hardly ever sees a minister of the gospel going around there in his bare feet, with a basket, begging for subsistence. In that country the preachers are not like our mendicant orders of friars—they have two or three suits of clothing, and they wash sometimes."... "I saw common men and common women who could read; I even saw small children of common country people reading from books; if I dared think you would believe it, I would say they could write, also.... I saw real glass windows in the houses of even the commonest people. Some of the houses are not of stone, nor yet of bricks; I solemnly swear they are made of wood. Houses there will take fire and burn, sometimes—actually burn entirely down, and not leave a single vestige behind. I could state that for a truth upon my death-bed. And, as a proof that the circumstance is not rare, I aver that they have a thing which they call a fire-engine, which vomits forth great streams of water, and is kept always in readiness, by night and by day, to rush to houses that are burning. You would think one engine would be sufficient, but some great cities have a hundred; they keep men hired, and pay them by the month to do nothing but put out fires. [20]... In that singular country if a rich man dies a sinner, he is damned; he cannot buy salvation with money for masses. There is really not much use in being rich there. Not much use as far as the other world is concerned, but much, very much, use as concerns this; because there, if a man be rich, he is very greatly honored, and can become a legislator, a governor, a general, a senator, no matter how ignorant an ass he is—just as in our beloved Italy the nobles hold all the great places, even though sometimes they are born noble idiots. There, if a man be rich, they give him costly presents, they ask him to feasts, they invite him to drink complicated beverages; but if he be poor and in debt, they require him to do that which they term to 'settle.'... In that country you might fall from a third-story window three several times and not mash either a soldier or a priest.... Jews there are treated just like human beings, instead of dogs.... They never have had to run races naked through the public streets against jackasses to please the people in carnival time; there they never have been driven by the soldiers into a church every Sunday for hundreds of years to hear themselves and their religion especially and particularly cursed." [21]

While I have Mark Twain in hand, I will make two more quotations from him, and then dismiss him for good. Looking from the dome of St. Peter's upon the building which was once the Inquisition, he says: "How times are changed, between the older ages and the new! Some seventeen or eighteen centuries ago, the ignorant men of Rome were wont to put Christians in the arena of the Coliseum yonder, and turn the wild beasts in upon them for a show. It was for a lesson as well. It was to teach the people to abhor and fear the new doctrine the followers of Christ were teaching. The beasts tore the victims limb from limb, and made poor mangled corpses of them in the twinkling of an eye. But when the Christians came into power, when the holy Mother Church became mistress of the barbarians, she taught them the error of their ways by no such means. No, she put them in this pleasant Inquisition, and pointed to the blessed Redeemer, who was so gentle and so merciful toward all men, and they urged the barbarians to love him; and they did all they could to persuade them to love and honor him—first by twisting their thumbs out of joint with a screw; then by nipping their flesh with pincers—red-hot ones, because they are the most comfortable in cold weather; then by skinning them alive a little, and finally by roasting them in public. They always convinced those barbarians. The true religion, properly administered, as the good Mother Church used to administer it, is very, very soothing. It is wonderfully persuasive, also. There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring up their finer feelings in an Inquisition. One is the system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened, civilized people. It is a great pity the playful Inquisition is no more."

Speaking of a mosaic group at the side of the Scala Santa which represents the Saviour, St. Peter, Pope Leo, St. Silvester, Constantine and Charlemagne, he says: "Peter is giving the pallium to the Pope, and a standard to Charlemagne. The Saviour is giving the keys to St. Silvester, and a standard to Constantine. No prayer is offered to the Saviour, who seems to be of little importance anywhere in Rome; but an inscription below says, 'Blessed Peter, give life to Pope Leo and victory to King Charles.' It does not say, 'Intercede for us, through the Saviour, with the Father, for this boon,' but 'Blessed Peter, give it us.'

"In all seriousness—without meaning to be frivolous, without meaning to be irreverent, and, more than all, without meaning to be blasphemous—I state, as my simple deduction from the things I have seen and the things I have heard, that the Holy Personages rank thus in Rome:

"First. 'The Mother of God'—otherwise the Virgin Mary.

"Second. The Deity.

"Third. Peter.

"Fourth. Some twelve or fifteen canonized popes and martyrs.

"Fifth. Jesus Christ the Saviour (but always an infant in arms).

"I may be wrong in this—my judgment errs often, just as is the case with other men's—but it is my judgment, be it good or bad.

"Just here I will mention something that seems curious to me. There are no 'Christ's Churches' in Rome, and no 'Churches of the Holy Ghost,' that I can discover. There are some four hundred churches, but about a fourth of them seem to be named for the Madonna and St. Peter. There are so many named for Mary that they have to be distinguished by all sorts of affixes, if I understand the matter rightly. Then we have churches of St. Louis, St. Augustine, St. Agnes, St. Calixtus, St. Lorenzo in Lucina, St. Lorenzo in Damaso, St. Cecilia, St. Athanasius, St. Philip Neri, St. Catherine, St. Dominico, and a multitude of lesser saints whose names are not familiar in the world—and away down, clear out of the list of the churches, comes a couple of hospitals; one of them is named for the Saviour and the other for the Holy Ghost!"

But we have allowed this clean, shrewd, racy American with his biting satire and his outspoken common sense, to lead us far away from our subject. Let us come back to the Church of the Cappuccini. For, besides its horrible cemetery, it contains another object of great interest, though of a very different character, viz., Guido's great picture of the Archangel Michael trampling upon the devil. The devil's face is said to be a portrait of Pope Innocent X., against whom the painter had a spite. It is not for the purpose of describing the picture that I refer to it, for I am not competent to do that, but for the purpose of quoting the animadversions of another American writer upon the custom of concealing this picture and others of special interest in Romish churches with closely drawn curtains, requiring the presence of an attendant to unveil them and the bestowment of a fee by the visitor. "The churchmen of Italy make no scruple of sacrificing the very purpose for which a work of sacred art has been created, that of opening the way for religious sentiment through the quick medium of sight, by bringing angels, saints and martyrs down visibly upon earth—of sacrificing this high purpose, and, for aught they know, the welfare of many souls along with it, to the hope of a paltry fee. Every work by an artist of celebrity is hidden behind a veil, and seldom revealed, except to Protestants, who scorn it as an object of devotion, and value it only for its artistic merit."

The same author (Hawthorne), speaking of the terrible lack of variety in the subjects of the great Italian masters, says a quarter part, probably, of any large collection of pictures consists of Virgins and infant Christs.... Half of the other pictures are Magdalens, Flights into Egypt, Crucifixions, etc. "The remainder of the gallery comprises mythological subjects, such as nude Venuses, Ledas, Graces, and, in short, a general apotheosis of nudity.... These impure pictures are from the same illustrious and impious hands that adventured to call before us the august forms of apostles and saints, the Blessed Mother of the Redeemer, and her Son, at his death, and in his glory, and even the awfulness of him to whom the martyrs, dead a thousand years ago, have not dared to raise their eyes. They seem to take up one task or the other—the disrobed woman whom they call Venus, or the type of highest and tenderest womanhood in the mother of the Saviour—with equal readiness, but to achieve the former with far more satisfactory success. If an artist sometimes produced a picture of the Virgin possessing warmth enough to excite devotional feelings, it was probably the object of his earthly love, to whom he thus paid the stupendous and fearful homage of setting up her portrait to be worshipped, not figuratively as a mortal, but by religious souls in their earnest aspirations towards divinity. And who can trust the religious sentiment of Raphael, or receive any of his Virgins as heaven-descended likenesses, after seeing, for example, the "Fornarina" of the Barberini Palace, and feeling how sensual the artist must have been to paint such a brazen trollop of his own accord, and lovingly? Would the Blessed Mary reveal herself to his spiritual vision, and favor him with sittings alternately with that type of glowing earthliness, the Fornarina?"

True, Hawthorne proceeds at once to weaken the force of this criticism somewhat by referring to the throng of spiritual faces, innocent cherubs, serene angels, pure-eyed madonnas, and "that divinest countenance in the Transfiguration"—all of which we owe to Raphael's marvellous brush. But the criticism above quoted is sound. And that Hawthorne himself saw how little such "sacred art" had availed to lift the representatives of this kind of worship out of gross sensualism, let the following passage witness: "Here was a priesthood, pampered, sensual, with red and bloated cheeks, and carnal eyes. With apparently a grosser development of animal life than most men, they were placed in an unnatural relation with woman, and thereby lost the healthy, human conscience that pertains to other human beings, who own the sweet household ties connecting them with wife and daughter. And here was an indolent nobility, with no high aims or opportunities, but cultivating a vicious way of life, as if it were an art, and the only one which they cared to learn. Here was a population, high and low, that had no genuine belief in virtue; and if they recognized any act as criminal, they might throw off all care, remorse and memory of it, by kneeling a little while at the confessional, and rising unburdened, active, elastic and incited by fresh appetite for the next ensuing sin."

Of course all the priests are not such as above described, as Eugene Sue has endeavored to show in the character of Gabriel in The Wandering Jew, and Victor Hugo in the character of the good bishop in Les Miserables, and Marie Corelli in the character of the good Cardinal Bonpre in The Master Christian. Hawthorne simply describes the prevailing type. Let it be observed, too, that he is speaking of the priests in Italy, not of those in America, among whom we are glad to believe there is a much larger proportion of good men. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that the present Premier of Italy has himself stated publicly, in a passage which I have quoted in Chapter XXIX., that there has been some improvement, at least in the outward conduct of the clergy, since the overthrow of the papal government, and that the immorality of the priests and cardinals is not so shamelessly flaunted in Rome as it used to be under the popes.

On the 20th of September, 1870, the Italian army entered Rome, after a slight resistance. This event, which marked the downfall of the temporal power of the papacy, the unification of Italy, and the establishment of religious liberty under the enlightened and progressive government of Victor Emmanuel, is properly commemorated in the name of a handsome street, Via Venti Settembre, which extends from the Porta Pia, where the army entered, to the Quirinal Palace, where the King resides. Appropriately placed on a street which thus commemorates the establishment of civil and religious freedom in Italy, are several of the Protestant churches, which for the last thirty years have caused a pure river of water of life to flow once more through Rome as in the days when the great Apostle of the Gentiles preached there the kingdom of God, and taught the things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness, none forbidding him.

At No. 7 on this high and pleasant street we find a tall, clean, handsome building, standing well back from the street, with a spacious, green yard in front, the whole occupying a portion of what were once the gardens of the Barberini Palace. A neat notice-board on the high iron picket fence informs us that this attractive building is the Presbyterian Church, and that the pastor is the Rev. J. Gordon Gray, D. D.

When you enter the church on Sunday morning, a few minutes before eleven o'clock, you find it filled with a congregation of exceptionally intelligent people, mostly English-speaking residents in Rome and English-speaking visitors from every part of the world, including many Christians of other denominations besides our own—for it does not take visitors in Rome long to find out how strong and wholesome is the spiritual nourishment here furnished, how broad-minded and large-hearted the minister is, and how surely he declares the whole counsel of God, without ever a syllable that can offend any of those who love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity. If you return in the afternoon, as you will do if you are wise, and as everybody does, in fact, after hearing him once, you will find the house full again, and, while you will see no splendid pageant, no rows of bishops and archbishops in purple and lace and furs, no robing and disrobing, no intoned service in Latin, no choral responses from high and gilded choir loft, no clouds of incense filling the air—you will hear the old sweet gospel in all its pristine purity—you will see the great apostle and his friends before you, instinct with life and love and zeal, as the minister lectures, with astonishing fullness and accuracy of information and sympathetic understanding, on Roman Sites which can be identified with St. Paul's Sojourn Here, The Saints of CÆsar's Household in the light of the Columbaria, The Site and probable incidents of Paul's Roman Trial, The First Martyrdoms and the probable Site of Nero's Circus, Paul's Two Years in his Hired House, Paul's Travels and Labors between his First and Second Roman Imprisonments, The Closing Years of Paul's Ministry, The Jews in Rome in Paul's Time—and you will hear things that make for the peace of your soul and for your upbuilding on your most holy faith as he expounds The Chief Elements of Paul's Teaching; Christ in Early Christian Art as found in the Roman Catacombs; The State after Death, Prayers to the Dead, and Prayers for the Dead, in the light of the testimony of the Roman Catacombs; The Place and Efficacy of the Sacraments in the light of the testimony of the Roman Catacombs; and The Ministry in the Early Church of the Catacombs.

Surely never was Christian workman better adapted to his work than Dr. Gray. The sturdy frame, the massive head, the clear eye, the kindly voice, the genial manner, the transparent sincerity, and the ready sympathy of the man, invite one's confidence from the first, and the longer you know him the more you value him for his rare combination of strength and tenderness, and for his wisdom, piety and learning. We had the good fortune to hear his sermon on the eighteenth anniversary of the formation of his pastorate in Rome, in which he reviewed the history of his church during those eighteen years, and the years immediately preceding, and the growth of Protestantism in Rome since the downfall of the papacy—and a deeply interesting discourse it was. It lifted one's hopes for the future of Italy. Undoubtedly the day is breaking over the darkness which has so long lain like a pall over this lovely land.

A good man is known by his prayers. There is a fullness, propriety and fervor about Dr. Gray's public prayers that are seldom equalled. The homesick stranger, with the wide ocean between him and his native land—the professional man wavering in health and doubtful as to the future—the stricken widow, who has lost her husband by the sudden stroke of death—as well as those who bear the usual burdens of the human heart, find themselves strangely comforted and cheered, strangely relieved of their toils and cares and anxieties and fears, strangely upborne and strengthened, as this man of God pours from a sympathetic heart the needs of his people into the ear of him who careth for us. Among the usual petitions on Sunday morning there is invariably one for the King of England and the royal family, the President of the United States, and the King and Queen of Italy. We had two reminders on the 22nd of February that it was Washington's birthday: one was the flags hanging out at the American Embassy, and the other was Dr. Gray's prayer of thanksgiving for the character and services of Washington. He never forgets anything.

Yet his activities are multifarious. His resourcefulness, adequacy and strength have long since made him the real dean of the fine force of Protestant ministers in Rome. His advice is sought by them, and by all manner of visitors to Rome, on all manner of subjects. He is deeply interested in the matter of excavating the house of Priscilla and Aquila, the Apostle Paul's friends, on the Aventine, and hopes to raise the necessary funds and have that done—a valuable service to archÆological and biblical learning. He ought by all means to be allowed to find time to publish a volume on The Apostle Paul in Rome. Dr. Gray is another of the many good gifts of Scotland to the world, and, like Dr. Alexander Whyte, of Edinburgh, and other eminent Scotchmen, is an Aberdeen man. They are some of the Aberdonians who almost tempt us at times to agree with the Aberdeen man of whom our good Scotch physician in Rome told me the other day, who said, "Tak' awa' Aberdeen and sax miles around it, and what would you have left?"