He resolved to found a new association on broader and simpler lines than the secret societies of the past, which should aim not only at the material freeing of Italy from her present bondage, but at her moral and religious regeneration.  To aim at material progress of any kind, without at the same time aiming at a higher moral progress, seemed to Mazzini absurd; to attempt to pull down without attempting to build up seemed to him criminal.  Thus he accused the Socialists of substituting the progress of humanity’s kitchen for the progress of humanity.  He believed that Italy, united and redeemed, was destined to shed through the world the light of a new moral unity, which should end the reign of Scepticism, triumphant among discordant creeds.  Mazzini’s religious belief was the motor of his whole being.  The Catholicism in which he was outwardly brought up never seems to have touched his inner nature; he went through no spiritual wrench in leaving a faith that was never a reality to him.  The same is true of innumerable young Italians, who, when they begin to read and study, drift out of their childhood’s religion without a struggle or a regret.  But thought and study brought Mazzini what it rarely brings to these young men—­the necessity to find something in which he could believe.  He had not long to seek for a basis to his creed, because he was one of the men from the prophets of old to Spinoza, from Spinoza to Gordon, to whom the existence of God is a matter of experience rather than an object of faith.  Starting from this point, he formed his religion out of what he regarded as its inevitable deductions.  If God existed, his creatures must be intended for perfection; if this were the Divine scheme, man’s one business was to carry it out.  He considered the idea of duty separated from the idea of God to be illogical.  Either the development of human things depended on a providential law, or it was left to chance and passing circumstance, and to the dexterity of the man who turned these to most account.  God was the sole source of duty; duty the sole law of life.  Mazzini did not denounce Catholicism or any other religion as false.  He saw in it a stepping-stone to purer comprehension, which would be reached when man’s intellect was sufficiently developed for him to be able to do without symbols.

[Illustration:  GIUSEPPE MAZZINI]

The conscience of humanity is the last tribunal.  Ideas, as well as institutions, change and expand, but certain fundamental principles are fixed.  The family would always exist; property would always exist.  The first, ‘the heart’s fatherland,’ was the source of the only true happiness, the only joys untainted by grief, which were given to man.  Those who wished to abolish the second were like the savage who cut down the tree in order to gather the fruit.  In the future, free association would be the great agent of moral and material progress.  The authority which once rested in popes and emperors now devolved on the people.  Instead of ‘God and the King,’ Mazzini proposed the new formula ‘God and the People.’  By the people he understood no caste or class, whether high or low, but the universality of men composing the nation.  The nation is the sole sovereign; its will, expressed by delegates, must be law to all its citizens.