For the progressive degradations exhibited by the Roman Church during the Age of Faith, something may be offered as at once an explanation and an excuse. Machiavelli relates, in his "History of Florence"--a work which, if inferior in philosophical penetration to his "Prince," is of the most singular merit as a literary composition--that Osporco, a Roman, having become pope, exchanged his unseemly name for the more classical one Sergius, and that his successors have ever since observed the practice of assuming a new name. [Sidenote: Connexion of religious ideas in Italy with its ethnical state.] This incident profoundly illustrates the psychical progress of that Church. During the fifteen centuries that we have had under consideration--counting from a little before the Christian era--the population of Italy had been constantly changing. The old Roman ethnical element had become eliminated partly through the republican and imperial wars, and partly through the slave system. The degenerated half-breeds, of whom the Peninsula was full through repeated northern immigrations, degenerated, as time went on, still more and more. After that blood admixture had for the most part ceased, it took a long time for the base ethnical element which was its product to come into physiological correspondence with the country, for the adaptation of man to a new climate is a slow, a secular change.
But blood-degeneration implies thought-degeneration. It is nothing more than might be expected that, in this mongrel race, customs, and language, and even names should change--that rivers, and towns, and men should receive new appellations. As the great statesman to whom I have referred observes, Cæsar and Pompey had disappeared; John, Matthew, and Peter had come in their stead. Barbarized names are the outward and visible signs of barbarized ideas. Those early bishops of Rome whose dignified acts have commanded our respect, were men of Roman blood, and animated with sentiments that were truly Latin; but the succeeding pontiffs, whose lives were so infamous and thoughts so base, were engendered of half-breeds. Nor was it until the Italian population had re-established itself in a physiological relation with the country--not until it had passed through the earlier stages of national life--that manly thoughts and true conceptions could be regained.