ards the interest of the Church
dominates over all considerations of public and private morals.

In past ages this was much more the case. The Church filled in the minds
of men a place at least equal to that of the State in the Roman
Republic. Men who had made great sacrifices for it and rendered great
services to it were deemed, beyond all others, the good men, and in
those men things which we should regard as grossly criminal appeared
mere venial frailties. Let any one who doubts this study the lives of
the early Catholic saints, and the still more instructive pages in which
Gregory of Tours and other ecclesiastical annalists have described the
characters and acts of the more prominent figures in the secular history
of their times, and he will soon feel that he has passed into a moral
atmosphere and is dealing with moral measurements and perspectives
wholly unlike those of our own day.[15]

In highly civilised ages the same spirit may be clearly traced. Bossuet
was certainly no hypocrite or sycophant, but a man of austere virtue and
undoubted courage. He did not hesitate to rebuke the gross profligacy
of the life of Louis XIV., and although neither he nor any of the other
Catholic divines of his age seriously protested against the wars of pure
egotism and ostentation which made that sovereign the scourge of Europe
and brought down upon his people calamities immeasurably greater than
the faults of his private life--although, indeed, he has spoken of those
wars in language of rapturous and unqualified eulogy[16]--he had at
least the grace to devote a chapter of his 'Politique tiree de
l'Ecriture Sainte' to the theme that 'God does not love war.' But in the
eyes of Bossuet the dominant fact in the life of Louis XIV. was the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the savage persecution of the
Huguenots, and this was sufficient to place him among the best of
sovereigns.[17]

To those who will candidly consider the subject there is nothing in this
which need excite surprise. The doctrine that the Catholic Church is the
inspired guide, representing the voice of the Divinity on earth and
deciding with absolute authority all questions of right and wrong, very
naturally led to the conviction that nothing which was conducive to its
interests could be really criminal, and in all departments of morals it
regulated the degrees of praise and blame. The doctrine which is still
so widely professed but now so faintly realised, that th