Edmund Burke died in 1797, when Rosmini was born. Between their two lives fell the great blow of the French Revolution, striking fire—a fire of fury—from the aged Burke’s mind and then echoing on behind all Rosmini’s political thought. Burke died fighting the Revolution as an unmitigated evil. Rosmini, living through the half century that followed the great upheaval, could neither simply accept nor simply denounce it; his task, as he saw it, was to contribute to the construction of a new order such as the new age required and was confusedly clamouring for. Burke, though an Irishman, was a Protestant; and though too great a man to be a mere politician, he was on the whole a Whig and a strong upholder of the English political system set up by the Whig aristocracy at the end of the seventeenth century. Rosmini, a Catholic and an Italian, could feel no such respect for the pre-revolutionary world. For him that world meant, above all, the Austrian Empire of which he was a subject by birth; the Empire’s Erastianism offended him as a Catholic, and its hold over divided Italy offended him as a patriot. If the Revolution had done nothing else it had punished the old Catholic states for oppressing the Church of which they professed themselves the defenders. To Rosmini, as to many Catholics of his generation, the open hostility of the Revolution seemed hardly more dangerous than a return to the cold suspicious patronage of the eighteenth-century governments. Freedom, they thought, even with poverty and persecution, was better than such patronizing protection.