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    Art . I . —Vie et M&moires de Scipion de Ricci 9 EvSgue de Pistoie et Prato , Riformaieur de Catholicisms en Toscane , sous le Rkgne de Leopold , < $

    the possible or apparent political tendencies of his church , and the zealous Protestant has generally found it his safest course of argument to perplex the Catholic with dwelling upon all the worst features of the Roman system , without at all considering whether there are any means of correcting its tendency , or what expedients even Catholic governments have adopted { and Protestant governments may , therefore , equally adopt ) for preventing any inconvenient encroachments from the temporal power of the Papal authorities .

    In truth , a review of the state of actual resistance to , and consequent triumph over , the spirit of Papal political encroachment , or curialism as it was called , and of the progress which was making , without any scruple on the part of Catholic sovereigns , towards providing that in practice the rights of the government , and the ease of the people , should suffer no

    inconvenience from foreign interference , will shew how little was to be apprehended in that quarter , how easily those actions which have a detrimental or conflicting influence upon a government may be restrained without any proscription of opinion , and how probable it is that , but for the consequences , direct and indirect , of the French Revolution , and of our own exertions to

    keep up the authority which we pretend now to be so inordinately afraid of , the temporal power of the Pope would at this moment have been not merely in substance , but almost in name , extinct . In France , the church had long maintained , to a great extent , its practical independence . In Austria and Belgiurh , the Papal dominion had been destroyed . In Tuscany , as we shall see , it had been equally abolished ; and

    even Naples and Spain had jgiven official iritimation of . their inclination to follow the example . Amidst all this revolt , where would have been the support of a system which avarice and the love of dominion in the Papal court undoubtedly fought hard to retain , but which it was wholly incompetent to preserve , against those governments which began to feel it to be their interest to knit trie church into more close union with themselves , and

    to destroy that spirit of Papal interference and authority over their subjects * which was often found highly inconvenient , and always expensive and bur * - densome ? Scipio de Rtcci was born at Florence in 1741 , a descendant of the famil y of Macchiavelli . His brother was the last General of the society of the

    Jesuits , and at its suppression was confined in the Castle of St . Angelo , where he died . Scipio was brought up with the same religious views , but earl y became a convert to Jansenism ; a rigid observer of the ritual discipline of the church , but a zealous opposer of the temporal encroachments or thfe Papal court ; a reformer , in short , to say the truth , not of the most tafttafrl *

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• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1827, page 507, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1798/page/35/