ion, examine the "Somme"
of Saint Thomas. Still at the present day his order, the Dominican,
furnishes at Rome those who are consulted on matters of dogma; or
rather, in order to abridge and transcribe scholastic formula into
perceptible images, read the "Divine Comedy "by Dante.[5332] It is
probable that this description, as far as imagination goes, is still
to-day the most exact as well as most highly-colored presentation of
the human and divine world as the Catholic Church conceives it. She has
charge of its keys and reigns and governs in it. The prestige of such
a government over multitudes of minds and souls, susceptible to
discipline, without personal initiative, and in need of firm and
systematic guidance, is supreme. It is equal to or superior to that of
the ancient roman State with its 120 million subjects. Outside of
the Empire all seemed to these souls anarchy or barbarism; the same
impression exists with the Catholics in relation to their Church.
Whether spiritual or temporal, an authority is more likely to be
approved and venerated when, always visible and everywhere present, it
is neither arbitrary nor capricious, but orderly, restrained by texts,
traditions, legislation and jurisprudence, derived from above and from
a superhuman source, consecrated by antiquity and by the continuity,
coherence and grandeur of its work, in short, by that character which
the Latin tongue is alone capable of expressing and which it terms
majesty.

Among the acts which religious authority prescribes to its subjects,
there are some which it imposes in its own name--rites, outward
ceremonies and other observances--of which the principal ones, in the
Catholic catechism, form a sequence to the "commandments of God,"
and which are entitled the "commandments of the Church."--With the
Protestants, where Church authority is almost gone, rites have almost
disappeared; considered in themselves, they have ceased to be regarded
as obligatory or meritorious; the most important ones, the Eucharist
itself, have been retained only as commemorative or as symbolic; the
rest, fasts, abstinences, pilgrimages, the worship of saints and the
Virgin, relics of the cross, words committed to memory, genuflections
and kneeling before images or altars, have been pronounced vain; in the
way of positive injunctions none remain but the reading of the Bible,
while duty in outward demonstration of piety is reduced to piety
within, to the moral virtues, to t