These considerations will help to explain how it was that the Church, in spite of its corruption, stood its ground and retained the respect of the people in Italy.  We must moreover bear in mind that, bad as it was, it still to some extent maintained the Christian verity.  Apart from the Roman Curia and the Convents, there existed a hierarchy of able and God-fearing men, who by the sanctity of their lives, by the gravity of their doctrine, by the eloquence of their preaching, by their ministration to the sick, by the relief of the poor, by the maintenance of hospitals, Monti di Pieta, schools and orphanages, kept alive in the people of Italy the ideal at least of a religion pure and undefiled before God.[1] In the tottering statue of the Church some true metal might be found between the pinchbeck at the summit and the clay of the foundation.

    [1] See the life of S. Antonino, the good Archbishop of
    Florence.

It must also be remembered how far the worldly interests and domestic sympathies of the Italians were engaged in the maintenance of their Church system.  The fibers of the Church were intertwined with the very heartstrings of the people.  Few families could not show one or more members who had chosen the clerical career, and who looked to Rome for patronage, employment, and perhaps advancement to the highest honors.  The whole nation felt a pride in the Eternal City:  patriotic vanity and personal interest were alike involved in the maintenance of the metropolis of Christendom, which drew the suites of ambassadors, multitudes of pilgrims, and the religious traffic of the whole of Europe to the shores of Italy.  It was easy for Germans and Englishmen to reason calmly about dethroning the Papal hierarchy.  Italians, however they might loathe the temporal power, could not willingly forego the spiritual primacy of the civilized world.

Moreover, the sacraments of the Church, the absolutions, consecrations, and benedictions which priests dispensed or withheld at pleasure, had by no means lost their power.  To what extent even the nations of the north still clung to them is proved by our own Liturgy, framed in the tumult of war with Rome, yet so worded as to leave the utmost resemblance to the old ritual consistent with the spirit of the Reformation.  Far more imposing were they in their effect upon the imagination of Italians, who had never dreamed of actual rebellion, who possessed the fountain of Apostolical privileges in the person of the Pope, and whose southern temperament inclined them to a more sensuous and less metaphysical conception of Christianity than the Germans or the English.  The dread of the Papal Interdict was still a reality.  Though the clergy of Florence, roused to retaliative fury, might fling back in the teeth of Sixtus such words as leno matris suae, adulterorum minister, diaboli vicarius, yet the people could not long endure ’the niggardly and imperfect rites, the baptism sparingly administered, the extreme unction or the last sacrament coldly vouchsafed to the chosen few, the churchyard closed against the dead,’ which, to quote the energetic language of Dean Milman,[1] were the proper fruits of the Papal ban, however unjustly issued and however manfully resisted.