LEO XIII. A GOOD many Protestants will be greatly disappointed with
the result of the Papal election, for the Cardinals assembled in Conclave have deserved very well of the Catholic world. They have acted with all requisite formality, but they have acted very promptly ; they have disputed exceedingly little, and their choice has fallen upon a man whom, for the present, at all events, all classes appear disposed to honour. It is always dangerous and usually impossible to decide on the character of a new Pope, because if the man believes his creed—and the days of unbelieving Popes have long since passed away—the Papal crown itself must gravely modify his character. A man cannot really think himself the delegate of God on earth, the depositary of the power of defining divine truth, and responsible for the spiritual welfare of 200,000,000 of Christians, and remain the same man he was before those tremendous prerogatives were committed to his charge. He must be affected to the last degree for good or for evil by the change,—a change, too, which comes so suddenly. The Pope has no heir-apparent, no successor even reasonably certain of his seat. A Pope has frequently appeared, even to his inti- mates, to have changed his character with his election ; and the old and melodramatic legend of Sixtus Quintus—a very cruel, though very vigorous Pope, as we read history—must, in some sense, be true of every successive wearer of the tiara. With this reserve, however, every known fact of his career speaks well for the character and the ability of Leo XIII. In a great Bishopric he has been markedly popular with a flock whom it is hard for an ecclesiastic to content. He created as Nuncio at Brussels an opinion in the mind of Leopold L, no mean judge of men, and harassed beyond expression by the religious dissensions in his country, that he was a wise and moderate as well as a good man. As a young man, he cleared all brigands out of the district of the Papal States within his jurisdiction, and beat down unsparingly the nobles who protected them, or who yielded to their threats. He bore with patience and with- out repining the late Pope's concealment of his Cardinalate for seven years, and when at last he was admitted to the Vatican and made Cardinal Camerlengo, he so bore himself in that place, usually fatal to the popularity of its possessor, that he enjoyed from the first the favour of his master and the largest following in the Conclave. All these things—none of which are denied or questioned—indicate a strong and patient man, who can take up a great burden of power, who knows how to con- ciliate men, and who can wait till his opportunity arrives. Then, Leo XITI. is anion of learning, and friendly to learning, and a man of the grave and stately presence which is accept- able in an ecclesiastical ruler, well as his predecessor contrived to dispense with it, and to assume a dignity, of another and less frequent type. Altogether, the Conclave appear to have chosen a man of the highest character, ability, and experience within.their reach, the object of such elections, but one very seldom attained.
Whether the new Pope will be " moderate," in the sense in which the word is used in Rome, is another question, and one on which first impressions are very likely to be deceived. He does not belong to the Irreconcilable party, but he owes his election to the sudden adhesion of a rival, Cardinal Franchi, at heart a politic Ultramontane ; he is believed to uphold strongly the pretensions of his Church, and he cannot have found favour with Pio Nono as an ecclesi- astical Liberal. Never having been a Sing, he may be less resentful at the loss of the temporal sovereignty, and being experienced in government, he may make, uncon- sciously, more allowance for the difficulties of secular rulers than an ordinary priest would do. But it is most unlikely that any Pope will sanction the occupation of the City of Rome, though he may give up the fiction of being a prisoner, quite impossible that he should tolerate the Falk Laws, and absurd to suppose that he can reinterpret Infallibility, or withdraw in any way that strange " counsel of perfection," the much- abused and little-read Syllabus. '" Moderation " in a Pope very often implies, in hostile mouths, infidelity to his own position, which no modern Pope, whatever his opinions, has the slightest temptation to be guilty of. He must remain Vicar of Christ,—that is, a ruler of the Church in- sensible to earthly pressure, and incapable of earthly compro- mise, or sink into a mere Bishop, whom Catholics will only obey ex officio, and whom outsiders will not in their hearts respect. It is said the Kings and Premiers, Prince Bismarck especially, are very pleased with the nomination, but it is just possible that within twelve months they may have changed their tone, and have recognised that there are more dangerous men than Pio Nono. A good many hints are abroad, which as yet are only hints and may be blunders, that Leo XIII. is one of that still limited number of great Catholics who believe that the future of the Papacy rests on the adhesion of the democracy, who see a road to power through democratic agencies, and who will rely, as in Belgium and Ireland, on the convictions of the people. He told good Catholics at Perugia not to abstain from the ballot-box, when the Vatican was supposed to be urging abstention ; and is believed to have approved the course of Riario Sforza, the Archbishop of Naples, who, great aristocrat as he was, rebuilt his power in Naples through the adhesion of the common people. If that is his tendency, if he sanctions free institutions, requiring electors only to listen to their clergy—and he gained his political experience as Nuncio in Belgium—there may be a new future before the Papacy, and we do not know that the Kings will love it any more than they do when it is supposed to be throwing the Syllabus daily at their heads. It is too early yet for an opinion, however. All that we know is, that a very strong and determined man, who has been very success- ful in very difficult and diverse offices, has mounted the Chair of St. Peter, and tranquilly accepted the control of the most powerful and wide-spread organisation in the world, an organisation which has at this juncture the two-fold advantage of being very nearly as free as it can be, and of honestly thinking itself subjected to hideous persecution.
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