a crumbled theology, a pagan Pope, amid the wreck of laws and the confusion of social order, il sue particolare and virtu, individuality and ability (energy, political genius, prowess, vital force:  virtu is impossible to translate, and only does not mean virtue), were the dominating and unrelenting factors of life.  Niccolo Machiavelli, unlike Montesquieu, agreed with Martin Luther that man was bad.  It was for both the Wittenberger and the Florentine, in their very separate ways, to found the school and wield the scourge.  In the naked and unashamed candour of the time Guicciardini could say that he loathed the Papacy and all its works.  ’For all that, he adds, ’the preferments I have enjoyed, have forced me for my private ends to set my heart upon papal greatness.  Were it not for this consideration, I should love Martin Luther as my second self.’  In the Discorsi, Machiavelli bitterly arraigns the Church as having ’deprived Italians of religion and liberty.’  He utterly condemns Savonarola, yet he could love and learn from Dante, and might almost have said with Pym, ’The greatest liberty of the Kingdom is Religion.  Thereby we are freed from spiritual evils, and no impositions are so grievous as those that are laid upon the soul.’

[Sidenote:  Religion.]

The Florentine postulates religion as an essential element in a strong and stable State.  Perhaps, with Gibbon, he deemed it useful to the Magistrate.  But his science is impersonal.  He will not tolerate a Church that poaches on his political preserves.  Good dogma makes bad politics.  It must not tamper with liberty or security.  And most certainly, with Dante, in the Paradiso, he would either have transformed or omitted the third Beatitude, that the Meek shall inherit the earth.  With such a temperament, Machiavelli must ever keep touch with sanity.  It was not for him as for Aristotle to imagine what an ideal State should be, but rather to inquire what States actually were and what they might actually become.  He seeks first and foremost ’the use that may be derived from history in politics’; not from its incidents but from its general principles.  His darling model of a State is to be found where Dante found it, in the Roman Republic.  The memory and even the substance of Dante occur again and again.  But Dante’s inspiration was spiritual:  Machiavelli’s frankly pagan, and with the latter Fortune takes the place of God.  Dante did not love the Papacy, but Machiavelli, pointing out how even in ancient Rome religion was politic or utilitarian, leads up to his famous attack upon the Roman Church, to which he attributes all the shame and losses, political, social, moral, national, that Italy has suffered at her hands.  And now for the first time the necessity for Italian Unity is laid plainly down, and the Church and its temporal power denounced as the central obstacles.  In religion itself the Secretary saw much merit.  ’But when it is an absolute question of the