ty-five out of sixty-four cardinals are likewise
Italians. The Roman stamp becomes still more evident on comparing the
millions of Christians who are Catholics with the millions of Christians
who are not. Among the primitive annexations and ulterior acquisitions
of the Roman Church, several have separated from her, those of the
countries whose Greek, Slavic and Germanic populations never spoke Latin
and whose language is not derived from the Latin. Poland and Ireland
are alone, or nearly so, the only countries which have remained loyal,
because, with these, the Catholic faith, under the long pressure of
public calamities, has become incorporated with national sentiment.
Elsewhere the Roman deposit is non-existent or too thin. On the
contrary, all the populations that were once Latinized have at bottom
remained Catholic; four centuries of imperial rule and of Roman
assimilation have deposited in them of layers of habits, ideas and
sentiments which endure.[5329] To measure the influence of this historic
layer it is sufficient to note that three elements compose it, all three
contemporary, of the same origin and of the same thickness, a Roman
language, the civil law of Rome, and Roman Christianity; each of these
elements, through its consistence, indicates the consistence of the
others.

Hence the profound and established characteristics by which the Catholic
branch now distinguishes itself from the other two issuing from the same
Christian trunk. With the Protestants, the Bible, which is the Word
of God, is the sole spiritual authority; all the others, the Doctors,
Fathers, tradition, Popes and Councils, are human and, accordingly,
fallible; in fact, these have repeatedly and gravely erred.[5330] The
Bible, however, is a text which each reader reads with his own eyes,
more or less enlightened and sensitive, with eyes which, in Luther's
time, possessed the light and sensibility of the sixteenth century, and
which, at the present time, read with the sensibility and light of
the nineteenth century; so that, according to epochs and groups, the
interpretation may vary, while authority, if not as regards the text, or
at least its meaning, belongs wholly to the individual. With the Greeks
and Slavs, as with the Catholics, it belongs only to the Church, that is
to say to the heads of the Church, the successors of the apostles.
But with the Greeks and Slavs, since the ninth century, the Church had
decreed no new dogmas; according