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.”
PRINTED BY
BALLANTYNE & COMPANY LTD
TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN
LONDON
THE WORKS OF
ISRAEL ZANGWILL
Uniformly bound, price 6s. each.
CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO. A Study of a
Peculiar People.
DREAMERS OF THE GHETTO.
GHETTO COMEDIES.
GHETTO TRAGEDIES.
THE CELIBATES’ CLUB, being the United
Stories of THE BACHELORS’ CLUB and THE
OLD MAIDS’ CLUB.
THE GREY WIG. Stories and Novelettes.
THE KING OF SCHNORRERS. Grotesques and
Fantasies.
THE MANTLE OF ELIJAH.
THE MASTER.
WITHOUT PREJUDICE (Essays).
_And with_ LOUIS COWEN
THE PREMIER AND THE PAINTER. A Fantastic
Romance.
_Also_
BLIND CHILDREN (Poems).
One vol., sq. 8vo, price 5s. net.
MERELY MARY ANN.
Fcap. 8vo., in coloured paper wrapper,
1s. net.
London: WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 21 Bedford St., W.C.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
Archaic spellings and hyphenation have been retained. Punctuation and
type-setting errors have been corrected without note.
This book contains Hebrew and Greek characters in the phrase: rendering
עלמה as παρθένος, or “virgin,”. Some reading devices will not display
some or all of the characters. The characters may be omitted entirely by
the device or replaced with other symbols. Computer browsers will
generally display the characters correctly if you wish to see the phrase
as it was originally printed.