The Roman Church has long ceased to be a distinctly religious institution; it has become a great human machine organized, disciplined like an army, for a war of shadows and formalities, but now employed in the conquest of political influence, a kingdom absolutely of this world.

It is as much a foreign body in Italy (or France) as if it were the Russian Church; it has no part or lot in the well-being of the Italian people, and, so far as the central power of it is concerned, the Vatican and its councils, its only purpose is to acquire political influence for its own political aggrandizement, to the exclusion from its field of operations of all other creeds.

For the attainment of this end it works with the single-eyedness which Christ recommended for other ends, to the neglect of all pressure on the people in the direction of common morality.

The Pope, in the present case an amiable, excellent ecclesiastic, is only one part of this machine, and through him it speaks, saying, practically, to the Italian people, "Be what you please, do what you please; only in all things which we command obey us,"-- obedience to the prescriptions of rites and ceremonies being, so far as my observation during my years of residence in Italy goes, considered as of far greater importance than the observance of the laws of sexual morality, veracity, or common honesty.

The rule of conduct of the parochial clergy has appeared to me to be to keep their influence over their flocks in purely ecclesiastical matters, and run no risk of straining that influence by interfering with their personal morality, or by making Christianity the difficult rule of life which it is in Puritan countries.
I have no hostility to Roman doctrine or dogma, for the distinction I make between the different forms of anthropomorphic religion is only one of degree, and I have so many personal friends amongst Roman Catholics in whom I see the fire of pure and living spirituality glowing through the forms and superstitions of their creed that I cannot join in that indiscriminate denunciation which is common amongst Protestants.