The head of this vast body, the Pope, is better known than any of the
inferior members; for, as spiritual head of the Church and absolute
sovereign of her temporal dominions, his peculiar position has always
made him the object of peculiar attention. Officially, he was for
centuries the acknowledged chief of Christendom, jealous of his
prerogatives, bold in his assumptions, often feared where he was not
reverenced, and often courted and flattered where he inspired neither
reverence nor fear. Individually, his education and habits, the books he
reads and the company he keeps, have seldom led him to study the causes
of national prosperity, and still more seldom taught him to sympathize
with the feelings or respect the rights of mankind.
From his childhood, the purest source of sympathies and affections is
closed for him rigorously and hopelessly. He grows up as a stranger at
the family-hearth; for, as he sits there, he is taught that he can never
have a family-hearth of his own. He begins life by renouncing its
dearest privileges, and training all his faculties for a relentless war
upon himself,--for repressing natural impulses, not guiding them,
extirpating his passions, not subduing them, and aiming at an
insensibility that can be attained only by the sacrifice of every human
instinct, rather than that serene tranquillity of spirit in which every
passion is recognized as a power for good as well as for evil, and all
are subjected alike to the guidance of a discriminating and
conscientious self-control.
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