HKB
Many among you, ladies and gentlemen, will go to Rome, or will return there. Ah, well! if you preserve any good remembrance of these conferences, go, in memory of me, to the Salvian waters, alle tre fontane, to St. Paul-without-the-Walls. It is one of the most beautiful parts of the Roman Campagna,--deserted, damp, green, and sad. There, in a deep depression in the soil, crowned by those grand horizontal lines, disturbed by no living detail,--there are some clear and cold springs. The fever and mouldiness of the tomb are inhaled there. Some Trappists are there established, conscientiously practising their religious suicide. When you are there, sit down a moment, not too long (one quickly catches the fever there), and, while the Trappists give you to drink the water which gushes from the three bounds which the head of Paul made, think of him who came here to talk of these legends with you, and to whom you have listened with so much courtesy and kind attention.
FOURTH CONFERENCE,
London, April 14, 1880.
ROME, THE CAPITAL OF CATHOLICISM.
FOURTH CONFERENCE.
ROME, THE CAPITAL OF CATHOLICISM.
Ladies and Gentlemen,--It is plain that the importance of the churches in the primitive Christian community was in proportion to their apostolic nobility. The guaranty of orthodoxy was in the succession of the bishops, by which the great churches were linked to the apostles. A direct line appeared to afford a very strong assurance of conformity of doctrine, and it was jealously maintained. Now, what can be said of a church founded by both Peter and Paul? It is clear that such a church ought to endure in order to have a veritable superiority over others. The chef-d'[oe]uvre of the competency of the Roman Church was the establishment of this superiority. That once assured, the ecclesiastical destiny of Rome was established. When this city should have cast off her secular character, she would have another,--a sacred capacity, corresponding to that of Jerusalem.
She would know how to confiscate to her profit this Christianity which she had so cruelly combated,--so much had humanity suffered, to escape from those whom fate had designed for this great secular task, regere imperio populos!
Under Antonine and Marcus Aurelius, Rome reached its highest grandeur; its rule of the whole world seemed to be undisputed; no cloud could be seen upon its horizon. The emigration from the provinces, above all from the Orient, was augmented rather than lessened. The Greek-speaking population was larger than it had ever been. All who desired a place in the world aspired to come to Rome: nothing was sanctioned until it had received the stamp of this universal exposition of the products of the entire universe.
The centre of a future catholic orthodoxy was evidently there. The well-developed germ of the Papacy existed under Antonine. The Church of Rome showed itself more and more indifferent to those crude Gnostic speculations which occupied some minds filled with the intellectual activity of the Greeks, but tainted with the reveries of the Orient. The organization of Christian society was the principal labor at Rome. This extraordinary city applied to this object the energetic moral strength and the practical genius which she has employed in the most diverse causes. Careless of speculation, decidedly hostile to dogmatic innovations, she presided there,--a mistress already trained by all the changes which had been brought about in discipline and in the hierarchy.
I.