a sovereign delight and the other abases it to
the extremest dejection.'[11] 'As much love as we give to creatures,'
said another saint, 'just so much we steal from the Creator.'[12] 'Two
things only do I ask,' said a third,[13] 'to suffer and to die.'
'Forsake all,' said Thomas a Kempis, 'and thou shalt find all. Leave
desire and thou shalt find rest.' 'Unless a man be disengaged from the
affection of all creatures he cannot with freedom of mind attend unto
Divine things.'

The gradual, silent and half-unconscious modification in the type of
Morals which took place after the Reformation was certainly not the
least important of its results. If it may be traced in some degree to
the distinctive theology of the Protestant Churches, it was perhaps
still more due to the abolition of clerical celibacy which placed the
religious teachers in the centre of domestic life and in close contact
with a large circle of social duties. There is even now a distinct
difference between the morals of a sincerely Catholic and a sincerely
Protestant country, and this difference is not so much, as
controversialists would tell us, in the greater and the less as in the
moral type, or, in other words, in the different degrees of importance
attached to different virtues and vices. Probably nowhere in the world
can more beautiful and more reverent types be found than in some of the
Catholic countries of Europe which are but little touched by the
intellectual movements of the age, but no good observer can fail to
notice how much larger is the place given to duties which rest wholly on
theological considerations, and how largely even the natural duties are
based on such considerations and governed, limited, and sometimes even
superseded by them. The ecclesiastics who at the Council of Constance
induced Sigismund to violate the safe-conduct he had given, and, in
spite of his solemn promise, to condemn Huss to a death of fire,[14] and
the ecclesiastics who at the Diet of Worms vainly tried to induce
Charles V. to act with a similar perfidy towards Luther, represent a
conception of morals which is abundantly prevalent in our day. It is no
exaggeration to say that in Catholic countries the obligation of
truthfulness in cases in which it conflicts with the interests of the
Church rests wholly on the basis of honour, and not at all on the basis
of religion. In the estimates of Catholic rulers no impartial observer
can fail to notice how their attitude tow