“Europe is in a tremendous crisis of doubts and desires.  Through the work of time, accelerated by your predecessors of the hierarchy of the Church, faith is dead, Catholicism is lost in despotism; Protestantism is lost in anarchy.  Look around you; you will find superstitious and hypocrites, but not believers.  The intellect travels in a void.  The bad adore calculation, physical good; the good pray and hope; nobody believes.  Kings, governments, the ruling classes, combat for a power usurped, illegitimate, since it does not represent the worship of truth, nor disposition to sacrifice one’s self for the good of all; the people combat because they suffer, because they would fain take their turn to enjoy; nobody fights for duty, nobody because the war against evil and falsehood is a holy war, the crusade of God.  We have no more a heaven; hence we have no more a society.

“Do not deceive yourself, Most Holy Father; this is the present state of Europe.

“But humanity cannot exist without a heaven.  The idea of society is only a consequence of the idea of religion.  We shall have then, sooner or later, religion and heaven.  We shall have these not in the kings and the privileged classes,—­their very condition excludes love, the soul of all religions,—­but in the people.  The spirit from God descends on many gathered together in his name.  The people have suffered for ages on the cross, and God will bless them with a faith.

“You can, Most Holy Father, hasten that moment.  I will not tell you my individual opinions on the religious development which is to come; these are of little importance.  But I will say to you, that, whatever be the destiny of the creeds now existing, you can put yourself at the head of this development.  If God wills that such creeds should revive, you can make them revive; if God wills that they should be transformed, that, leaving the foot of the cross, dogma and worship should be purified by rising a step nearer God, the Father and Educator of the world, you can put yourself between the two epochs, and guide the world to the conquest and the practice of religious truth, extirpating a hateful egotism, a barren negation.

“God preserve me from tempting you with ambition; that would be profanation.  I call you, in the name of the power which God has granted you, and has not granted without a reason, to fulfil the good, the regenerating European work.  I call you, after so many ages of doubt and corruption, to be apostle of Eternal Truth.  I call you to make yourself the ‘servant of all,’ to sacrifice yourself, if needful, so that ‘the will of God may be done on the earth as it is in heaven’; to hold yourself ready to glorify God in victory, or to repeat with resignation, if you must fail, the words of Gregory VII.:  ’I die in exile, because I have loved justice and hated iniquity.’

“But for this, to fulfil the mission which God confides to you, two things are needful,—­to be a believer, and to unify Italy.  Without the first, you will fall in the middle of the way, abandoned by God and by men; without the second, you will not have the lever with which only you can effect great, holy, and durable things.