The Italian nation has been at last united in our own days, and we all rejoiced in its union. Yet we may be allowed to doubt whether the union was not a little too speedy and a little too thorough. It is surely carrying unity too far to wipe out all traces of the independent being, for most purposes to wipe out the very name, of such a land as Sicily. It jars on our feelings to find that, while Ireland at least forms part of the royal style of its sovereign, Sicily is no longer even a geographical expression. The island realm of Roger has sunk to be seven provinces of the kingdom on the mainland. And there is another result of Italian unity, a result in which we may rejoice without drawbacks, but which still has somewhat of sadness about it as finally ending that great phase of the history of Europe with which we have throughout been dealing. Never were ties with the past so fully snapped as when the army of Italy entered liberated Rome. Of all novelties in European history the greatest was when Rome became the centre of a dominion with acknowledged metes and bounds, the head in short of a local Italian kingdom. “Rome the capital of Italy” was a formula which might well gladden our hearts; but it was a formula which formally swept away the œcumenical position, the œcumenical traditions, of Rome. Till that day some shadow of her œcumenical position had lived on. Under the temporal dominion of her Bishops, she was indeed the temporal capital, not of all Italy but of a part. But the temporal headship of the part did not wipe out the œcumenical position as is done by the temporal headship of the whole. Rome was not the mere head of the Papal States; the Papal States was something which her Bishops held as a temporal appendage to their position as Bishops of the œcumenical city. But the kingdom of Italy is not an appendage to Rome; Rome is the head of the kingdom. The whole is greater than its part; Rome, by her own free will and by the free will of Italy, has become less than Italy. By becoming the willing head of an Italian kingdom she has formally cast aside her Imperial traditions as they were not cast aside when brute force made her the head of a French department. The deliverance of 1870 was the formal record of the fact that, in the sense in which I used the words in the opening of this lecture, the world is Romeless.