ect it not with the ague-stricken peasant
dying without help in the fens, but with the abbot, his ambling palfrey,
his hawk and hounds, his well-stocked cellar and larder. He is part of
a system that has its centre of authority in Italy.. To that his
allegiance is due. For its behoof are all his acts. When we survey, as
still we may, the magnificent churches and cathedrals of those
times, miracles of architectural skill--the only real miracles of
Catholicism--when in imagination we restore the transcendently
imposing, the noble services of which they were once the scene, the
dim, religious-light streaming in through the many-colored windows, the
sounds of voices not inferior in their melody to those of heaven,
the priests in their sacred vestments, and above all the prostrate
worshipers listening to litanies and prayers in a foreign and unknown
tongue, shall we not ask ourselves, Was all this for the sake of those
worshipers, or for the glory of the great, the overshadowing authority
at Rome?

But perhaps some one may say, Are there not limits to human
exertion--things which no political system, no human power, no matter
how excellent its intention, can accomplish? Men cannot be raised from
barbarism, a continent cannot be civilized, in a day!

The Catholic power is not, however, to be tried by any such standard.
It scornfully rejected and still rejects a human origin. It claims to
be accredited supernaturally. The sovereign pontiff is the Vicar of God
upon earth. Infallible in judgment, it is given to him to accomplish
all things by miracle if need be. He had exercised an autocratic tyranny
over the intellect of Europe for more than a thousand years; and, though
on some occasions he had encountered the resistances of disobedient
princes, these, in the aggregate, were of so little moment, that the
physical, the political power of the continent may be affirmed to have
been at his disposal.

Such facts as have been presented in this chapter were, doubtless,
well weighed by the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century, and
brought them to the conclusion that Catholicism had altogether failed in
its mission; that it had become a vast system of delusion and imposture,
and that a restoration of true Christianity could only be accomplished
by returning to the faith and practices of the primitive times. This was
no decision suddenly arrived at; it had long been the opinion of many
religious and learned men. The pious Fr