“I cannot admit,” replied the Cardinal, “that the Church is in antagonism with political freedom. On the contrary, in my opinion, there can be no political freedom which is not founded on Divine authority; otherwise it can be at the best but a specious phantom of licence inevitably terminating in anarchy. The rights and liberties of the people of Ireland have no advocate except the Church, because there political freedom is founded on Divine authority; but if you mean by political freedom the schemes of the illuminati and the Freemasons, which perpetually torture the Continent, all the dark conspiracies of the secret societies, then I admit the Church is in antagonism with such aspirations after liberty; those aspirations, in fact, are blasphemy and plunder. And if the Church were to be destroyed, Europe would be divided between the atheist and the communist.” This last opinion is Disraeli’s own. None knew better, or realised more, the disintegrating terrors of the secret societies, the propaganda of desperation served by desperadoes and exploited by soldiers of fortune. Disraeli appreciated and often testified that Roman Christianity had pre-eminently spiritualised the once undecayed Latin races. To its services and ideals he always paid the deepest homage; for some of them he displayed an evident affection. Nowhere has the higher aspiration of Romanism been portrayed more touchingly than in the person of “Clare Arundel.” The description in that book of the _Tenebræ_ vibrates with delicate emotion. In the same book he foresees the erection on the site of slums of the stately fane which now adorns Westminster. His public utterances on Ireland, on the Maynooth question, and many others, his ardent championship of the bill which secured the offices of his priest for the Catholic prisoner, showed not only respect, but a sympathy and conversance with Roman affairs passing that of ordinary statesmen. But, as a statesman, he also realised that the Roman Church was not only hostile to the Anglo-Saxon instincts, but has always claimed a despotic temporal dominion; and he also realised not only the earlier and far-reaching designs of Cardinal Wiseman, but the later diplomacies of a definite scheme for the capture, now that absolutism is on the wane, of democracy. Rome means to be the sole absolutism that shall survive. What Disraeli dreaded and countervailed was the new-fangled alliance, not only between Radicalism, but between Liberalism and Romanism. In Ireland, as I shall show, a peculiar phase of the design was apparent, and what Rome had manœuvred she came to deplore and even to struggle to prevent. In _Lothair_, “Monsignor Berwick,” Antonelli’s ultramontane disciple, is made to say of “Churchill,” the leader of Irish Nationalism, “For the chance of subverting the Anglican establishment, he is favouring a policy which will subvert religion itself.”