lf
up in a dark closet till the deadly affray was ended, and then made
his body over in charge to a friend, to be preserved, as he said, for
the remaining assailant. Madame d'Agoult was married to an old man, a
book-worm, who cared for nought else but his library; he did not know
even the number of children he possessed, and so little the old
philosopher cared about the matter that when a stranger came to the
house, he invariably, at the appearance of the family, said: "Allow me
to present to you my wife's children"; all this with the blandest
smile and most contented air.

ROMANISM

I know not that history has anything more wonderful to show than the
part which the Catholic Church has borne in the various civilizations
of the world.

What a marvellous structure it is, with its hierarchy ranging through
long centuries almost from apostolic days to our own; living side by
side with forms of civilisation and uncivilisation, the most diverse
and the most contradictory, through all the fifteen hundred years and
more of its existence; asserting an effective control over opinions
and institutions; with its pontificate (as is claimed) dating from the
fisherman of Galilee, and still reigning there in the city that heard
Saint Peter preach, and whom it saw martyred; impiously pretending to
sit in his chair and to bear his keys; shaken, exiled, broken again
and again by schism, by Lutheran revolts and French revolutions; yet
always righting itself and reasserting a vitality that neither force
nor opinion has yet been able to extinguish. Once with its foot on the
neck of kings, and having the fate of empires in its hands, and even
yet superintending the grandest ecclesiastical mechanism that man ever
saw; ordering fast days and feast days, and regulating with omnipotent
fiat the very diet of millions of people; having countless bands of
religious soldiery trained, organized, and officered as such a
soldiery never was before nor since; and backed by an infallibility
that defies reason, an inquisition to bend or break the will, and a
confessional to unlock all hearts and master the profoundest secrets
of all consciences. Such has been the mighty Church of Rome, and there
it is still, cast down, to be sure, from what it once was, but not yet
destroyed; perplexed by the variousness and freedom of an intellectual
civilisation, which it hates and vainly tries to crush; laboriously
trying to adapt itself to the Europe of the ninete