enth century, as it
once did to the Europe of the twelfth; lengthening its cords and
strengthening its stakes, enlarging the place of its tent, and
stretching forth the curtains of its habitations, even to this
Republic of the New World.

The only wonder is that such a church should be able to push its
fortunes so far into the centre of modern civilization, with which it
can feel no sympathy, and which it only embraces to destroy. I confess
I find it difficult to believe that a total lie could administer
comfort and aid to so many millions of souls; and the explanation is,
no doubt, that it is all not a total lie; for even its worse doctrines
are founded on certain great truths which are accepted by the common
heart of humanity.

There is such a thing as universal truth, and there is such a thing as
apostolic succession, made not by edicts, bulls, and church canons,
but by an interior life divine and true. But all these Rome has
perverted, by hardening the diffusive spirit of truth into so much
mechanism cast into a mould in which it has been forcibly kept; and by
getting progressively falser and falser as the world has got older and
wiser, till the universality became only another name for a narrow and
intolerant sectism, while the infallibility committed itself to
absurdity, and which reason turns giddy, and faith has no resource but
to shut her eyes; and the apostolic succession became narrowed down
into a mere dynasty of priests and pontiffs. A hierarchy of magicians,
saving souls by machinery, opening and shutting the kingdom of heaven
by a "sesame" of incantations which it would have been the labour of a
lifetime to make so much as intelligible to St. Peter or St. Paul.

Now who shall compute the stupefying and brutalising effects of such a
religion? Who will dare say that a principle which so debases reason
is not like bands of iron around the expanding heart and struggling
limbs of modern freedom?

Who will dare tell me that this terrible Church does not lie upon the
bosom of the present time like a vast unwieldy and offensive corpse,
crushing the life-blood out of the body of modern civilization? It is
not as a religious creed that we are looking at this thing; it is not
for its theological sins that we are here to condemn it; but it is its
effect upon political and social freedom that we are discussing. What
must be the ultimate political and social freedom that we are
discussing? What must be the ultimat