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Show MAZZINI. Only a few weeks ago one of our local preachers delivered a sensationally eulogistic discourse on'1 Giuseppe Mazzini. the Italian revolutionist, thirty-' third degree Mason and deist. After reading a synopsis of the minister's panegyric on the Italian infidel, we felt satisfied that the lecturer knew very little of his subject or the political conditions obtaining ob-taining in France and Italy sixty years ago. Since the preacher's flamboyant laudation of the Italian free-thinker, a writer in a leading New York organ speaks of Mazzini as of a political prophet, one of the founders of the future, whose work Avas not understood in his own times. If his work was not understood, there might be some excuse for this species of implied eulogy, but enough of it at least was comprehended to justify us in saying that if the devil became incarnated in a human body and led an attack on the Pope, he would not want for admirers ad-mirers or indeed followers among some of our fanatical fa-natical preachers and writers. That greatest of American philosophers and dialecticians, Orestes A. i Brownson. the contemporary of Mazzini, denounced the Italian as one of the most dangerous scoundrels and one of the most treacherous assassins of Christianity Chris-tianity to which the nineteenth century gave birth. In one of his novels, Dickens says an English footpad is a very commonplace and disgusting object, ob-ject, but dress him in green velvet, clap a feather in his hat and call him a bandit, and at once he is a personage of interest and a hero of romance. Call a man Harry Orchard, let him set an explosive under un-der a railroad platform with the intention of blowing blow-ing up' non-strikers, or let him destroy his enemy underN the protection of darkness, and he is hanged off with the applause of all good no-popery men; but call him by the name of Giuseppi Mazzini, let him have a thoughtful aspect and an inflated style, let him preach a gospel of midnight murder even put the dagger into the hands of the assassin and he will find all these no-popery men, and among them a Salt Lake preacher, to admire him. Though of a shifty life and character enough. Mazzini never sought to disguise his doctrines. His policy was not unlike that of mad old King Lear: "It were a delicate stratagem to shoe A troop of horse with felt; I'll put in proof ; And when I have stolen on these sons-in-law, Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill." . All Mazzini's revolutionary plans were designed to commence with the slaughter of sentries or something some-thing of an equally chivalrous nature. He advised the youth of Italy to cherish the knife as the means of the liberation of their country, jus as the inner circle of the anarchists encourages the red socialists of the United. States to study the explosive properties prop-erties of dynamite and nitroglycerine for the emancipation eman-cipation of American humanity. Yet though every student of the Italy of 1848 i . i i . i i i Knows xnis, it aoes not shock nis no-popery aamirers, for the simple reason that Mazzini was the enemy of the Papacy. Hatred to the Papacy, in the eyes'of the bigot, covers a multitude of atrocities and crimes. There was scarcely ever-a conspiracy which won an apparent success by the employment of baser means than the movement initiated and carried out for a united Italy. Nearly every man prominently engaged in that conspiracy was notorious for his own peculiar species of villiany. Cavour aimed at embodying in his own person the morality of Machiavelli; Pianelli emulated the cruelties of an oriental despot; Cialdini had the temper and disposition dis-position of a cowboy; Garibaldi was rotten with an immorality of a foul and vicious kind, and thirsted for the blood of priests, as does the Caledonia hound for the blood of the deer; but above them all stood Mazzini, pre-eminent and conspicuous for the cunning cun-ning of his mind and the viciousness of his character. char-acter. He struck at the very foundations of morality moral-ity to raise assassination and elevate murder into a kind of religion. That the grave of such a man should be garlanded with panegyrics by Protestant ministers and Christian essayists' argues for a low tone of knowledge or morality in the pulpits and at the composing desks of a Certain section of our countrymen. Marie Corelli wrote "The Sorrows of Satan.". It is how in order for some preacher, hungry for notoriety, to preach the'"apotheosis of Judas Iscariot or a panegyric on 'Pontius Pilate. |