lecture-rooms, particularly at Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Edinburgh.[80] Secularism naturally seeks to magnify, as much as may be, its own importance; and it is not to the declarations of its apostles that we must refer in order to estimate the extent and influence of its action.  At the same time the existence of a society, the avowed object of which is the diffusion of practical atheism, cannot be regarded with indifference.  At the present moment the affairs of the sect would not appear to be flourishing.  A year ago a secularist orator had delivered a vehement speech in favor of virtue.  Just as he had resumed his seat, a policeman entered the room and took him into custody.  A few days afterwards the Times informed its readers that the orator of virtue had just been condemned for theft to twelve months’ hard labor.[81] In the Secular World of the 1st January, 1864, Mr. Holyoake complains that a great many mauvais sujets seem to seek in secularism a kind of cheap religion.  He declares that he is going to use energetic efforts to purify the sect, and seems to intimate that he shall retire if his efforts fail.  Let us leave him to wrestle against the invasion of the orators of virtue, and let us pass from England into Italy.

While Italy is seeking to deliver itself from the bayonets of Austria, it is threatened with subjection to the influence of the most pernicious German doctrines.  After having bent, like nearly all Europe, in the eighteenth century, beneath the blast of sensualism, Italy made a noble effort to renew more generous traditions.  Two eminent men, Rosmini and Gioberti, the second especially, succeeded in exciting in the youth of Italy a passionate interest in doctrines in which liberty and vigor of thought were united with the confidence of faith.  This intellectual movement preceded and prepared a national movement, the course of which has been precipitated by the intrigues of politics and the intervention of the arms of the foreigner.  At the present time the influence of Rosmini and of Gioberti is on the decline.  Hegelianism is being installed with a certain eclat in the university of Naples.  Nothing warrants us in hoping that this system will not produce upon the shores of the Mediterranean the same depravation of philosophic thought which it has produced in Germany.  In the ancient university of Pisa, M. Auguste Conti, a brave defender of Christian philosophy, steadfastly maintains the union of religion and of speculative inquiry,[82] and the centre of Italy is less affected perhaps than the extremities of the Peninsula by the spirit of infidelity.  But as we go further north, we encounter in the writings of Ferrari the utterance of a gloomy scepticism, and in those of Ausonio Franchi, formerly a journalist at Turin, and now a Professor at Milan, the manifestations of an almost undisguised atheism.  Ausonio Franchi, or rather the man who assumes that pseudonyme, is an ex-priest, who, “while maintaining