ted or debased. The
sacraments and devotions and practices of worship, are in themselves as
potent if a Borgia sits in the chair of St. Peter as they are if a
Hildebrand, and Innocent III or a Leo XIII is the occupant; nevertheless
every weakening or degradation of the visible organism affects, and
inevitably, the attitude of men towards the thing itself, and when this
declension sets in and continues unchecked, the result is, first, a
falling away and a discrediting of religion that sometimes results in
general abandonment, and second--and after a time--a new outpouring of
spiritual power that results in complete regeneration. The Church, in
its human manifestation, is as subject to the rhythmical rise and fall
of the currents of life as is the social organism or man himself,
therefore it is not to be expected that it will pursue a course of even
exaltation, or maintain a status that is impeccable.

Now the working out of this law had issue in a great decline that began
with the Exile at Avignon and was not terminated until the Council of
Trent. In the depth of this catastrophe came the natural and righteous
revolt against the manifold and intolerable abuses, but, like all
reforming movements that take on a revolutionary character, reform and
regeneration were soon forgotten in the unleashed passion for
destruction and innovation, while the new doctrines of emancipation from
authority, and the right of private judgment in religious matters, were
seized upon by sovereigns chafing under ecclesiastical control, as a
providential means of effecting and establishing their own independence,
and so given an importance, and an ultimate victory that, in and by
themselves, they could hardly have achieved. In the end it was the
secular and autocratic state that reaped the victory, not the reformed
religion, which was first used as a tool and then abandoned to its
inevitable break-up into numberless antagonistic sects, some of them
retaining a measure of the old faith and polity, others representing all
the illiteracy and uncouthness and fanaticism of the new racial and
social factors as these emerged at long last from the submergence and
the oppression that had been their fate with the dissolution of
Mediaevalism.

Meanwhile the Roman Church which stood rigidly for historic Christianity
and had been preserved by the Counter-Reformation to the Mediterranean
states, continued bound to the autocratic and highly centralized
adminis