There Are Indications That This
State Of Affairs Is Now Ending.
The position is this.
The records show that the common people never took
their saints to heart in the northern fashion - as moral exemplars; from
beginning to end, they have only utilized them as a pretext for fun and
festivals, a means of brightening the cata-combic, the essentially
sunless, character of Christianity. So much for the popular saints, the
patrons and heroes. The others, the ecclesiastical ones, are an
artificial product of monkish institutions. These monkeries were
established in the land by virtue of civil authority. Their continued
existence, however, was contingent upon the goodwill of the Vatican. One
of the surest and cheapest methods of obtaining this goodwill was to
produce a satisfactory crop of saints whose beatification swelled the
Vatican treasury with the millions collected from a deluded populace for
that end. The monks paid nothing; they only furnished the saint and, in
due course, the people's money. Can we wonder that they discovered
saints galore? Can we wonder that the Popes were gratified by their
pious zeal?
So things went on till yesterday. But now a large proportion of the ten
thousand (?) churches and monasteries of Naples are closed or actually
in ruins; wayside sanctuaries crumble to dust in picturesque fashion;
the price of holy books has fallen to zero, and the godly brethren have
emigrated to establish their saint-manufactories elsewhere. Not without
hope of success; for they will find purchasers of their wares wherever
mankind can be interested in that queer disrespect of the body which is
taught by the metaphysical ascetics of the East.
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