Neither the reformed Vatican of Gioberti nor the kingless Quirinal of Mazzini can provide the next phase in human evolution. Profound was that teaching of Jesus—you cannot put the new wine in the old bottles. It was not unnatural that an Italian should look to Rome for the third mission. Rome of the CÆsars, Rome of the Popes, Rome of the People! What a fascinating trinity! The conception of a Rome that having lived twice as a world-force must live again, seized Mazzini in his youth, enthralled his maturity, and was the key-note of his speech to the Roman Assembly in the brief hour of his glory. “After the Rome of conquering soldiers, after the Rome of the triumphant Word, the Rome of virtue and of example.” And he repeated it, not yet disillusioned, in the very last years of his life; founding a journal to bring Roma del Popolo into being. And yet he had in the interim published “From the Council to God,” that wonderful sketch of the new religion for which the world is thirsting, had added one of the grandest pages to the unclosed Bible of humanity. That page, indeed, is perhaps still theology rather than theonomy, still too saturated with the old optimism—humanity may have to part even with the assurance of personal immortality, and go, starred with sorrows and sacrifices, to its obscure doom. But this optimism, this burning conviction of a new heaven and a new earth, is the very stuff of which great religions are made, and Mazzini appears like the mighty prophet of the next phase of the spirit, the divine iconoclast whose fuller faith was to give the death-blow to the old theology. And the real miscarriage of Mazzini’s career is not that he laboured for a Republic and begot a Monarchy, not that he sowed for a new social order and reaped stones and statues, but that he spent himself on the doubtful means instead of the certain end, on the creation of a United Italy which was to be the organon of the new spirit, but which is only a nation like the others. The great soul that might have kindled the new faith wore itself out in futile political conspiracies and vain exiles. How much grander, how much worthier of his genius and saintliness, might have been Mazzini’s achievement, had he not been obsessed, like the Middle Ages, by the figment of the Holy Roman Empire; had he, instead of working through Nationalism, gone straight for the foundation of a new international Church. Moses, a greater than Mazzini, had failed in this dream of a prophet-people, nor is there any more assurance that the Law will go forth from Rome than from Zion. Mazzini himself protested against the notion that the French continued to be the chosen people; after 1814 their initiative ended, he urged. He protested, too, against the notion that an instrument created for one purpose can be used for another. Why, then, did he, whose organising powers might have found supreme scope in establishing the religion of the future, throw away his life for Nationalism? Valuable instrument of world-progress as nationality within sane limits may be, alluring as is the idea of working through one’s own nation, perfecting a model people, in whom all the families of the earth shall be blessed, the instruments of the new order exist insufficiently in any one people, if indeed they exist sufficiently in the whole population of the globe. More insistently even than nationalities the world needs a new Church. By giving up to Italy what was meant for mankind, Mazzini missed creating what he prophesied, missed fulfilling and purging of its monastic and mediÆval limitations that earlier prophecy of the twelfth-century Calabrian abbot whom Dante placed in Paradise. “The Kingdom of the Father has passed, the Kingdom of the Son is passing,” taught Joachim of Flora. “The Third Kingdom will be the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost.”

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