rfect, but Newton had been a fool if he had scoffed at
Ptolemy. Newton could not have been without Ptolemy, nor Ptolemy without
the Chaldees; and as it is with the minor sciences, so far more is it
with the science of sciences--the science of life, which has grown
through all the ages from the beginning of time. We speak of the errors
of the past. We, with this glorious present which is opening on us, we
shall never enter on it, we shall never understand it, till we have
learnt to see in that past, not error, but instalment of truth,
hard-fought-for truth, wrung out with painful and heroic effort. The
promised land is smiling before us, but we may not pass over into the
possession of it while the bones of our fathers who laboured through the
wilderness lie bleaching on the sands, or a prey to the unclean birds.
We must gather their relics and bury them, and sum up their labours, and
inscribe the record of their actions on their tombs as an honourable
epitaph. If Catholicism really is passing away, if it has done its work,
and if what is left of it is now holding us back from better things, it
is not for our bitterness but for our affectionate acknowledgment, nor
for our heaping contempt on what it is, but for our reverend and patient
examination of what it has been, that it will be content to bid us
farewell, and give us God speed on our further journey.

In the Natural History of Religions, certain broad phenomena perpetually
repeat themselves; they rise in the highest thought extant at the time
of their origin; the conclusions of philosophy settle into a creed; art
ornaments it, devotion consecrates it, time elaborates it. It grows
through a long series of generations into the heart and habits of the
people; and so long as no disturbing cause interferes, or so long as the
idea at the centre of it survives, a healthy, vigorous, natural life
shoots beautifully up out of the intellectual root. But at last the idea
becomes obsolete; the numbing influence of habit petrifies the spirit in
the outside ceremonial, while new questions arise among the thinkers,
and ideas enter into new and unexplained relations. The old formula will
not serve; but new formulae are tardy in appearing; and habit and
superstition cling to the past, and policy vindicates it, and statecraft
upholds it forcibly as serviceable to order, till, from the combined
action of folly, and worldliness, and ignorance, the once beautiful
symbolism becomes at last