lfilled. It was fulfilled six centuries ago; and no power
of genius, no miracle of will, can avail to revive it. Innocent III. was
the last true Pope. He was the last who endeavored to make the supremacy
of the moral law of the epoch over the brute force of the temporal
governments--of the spirit over matter, of God over Caesar--an organic
social _fact_.

And such was in truth the mission of the Papacy,--the secret of its
power, and of the willing adherence and submission yielded to it by
humanity for eight hundred years. That mission was incarnated in one of
the greatest of Italians in genius, virtue, and iron strength of
will,--Gregory VII.,--and yet he failed to prolong it. One hundred and
fifty years afterwards, the gigantic attempt had become but the dim
record of a past never to return. With the successors of Innocent III.
began the decline of the Papacy; it ceased to infuse life into humanity.
A hundred years later, and the Church had become scandalously corrupt in
the higher spheres of its hierarchy, persecuting and superstitious in
the lower. A hundred years later it was the ally, and in one hundred
more the servant of Caesar, and had lost one half of Europe.

From that time forward it has unceasingly declined, until it has sunk to
the thing we now behold it;--disinherited of all power of inspiration
over civilization; the impotent negation of all movement, of all
liberty, of all development of science or life; destitute of all sense
of duty, power of sacrifice, or faith in its own destiny; held up by
foreign bayonets; trembling before the face of the peoples, and forsaken
by humanity, which is seeking the path of progress elsewhere.

The Papacy has lost all moral basis, aim, sanction, and source of action
at the present day. Its source of action in the past was derived from a
conception of heaven since changed,--from a notion of life since proved
imperfect,--from a conception of the moral law inferior to that of the
new epoch in course of initiation,--from a solution of the eternal
problem of the relation between man and God since rejected by the human
heart, intellect, conscience, and tradition.

The dogma itself which the Church once represented is exhausted and
consumed. It no longer inspires faith, no longer has power to unite or
direct the human race.

The time of a new dogma is approaching, which will re-link earth with
heaven in a vaster synthesis, fruitful of new and harmonious life.

It is for t