trunk that
gave signs of decrepitude. On one side stood the reanimated faith, in
its right hand the book open, and its left hand lifted up to heaven,
appealing for its proof to the Word of the Testimony and the power of
the Holy Ghost. On the other stood, or seemed to stand, all beloved
custom and believed tradition; all that for fifteen hundred years had
been closest to the hearts of men, or most precious for their help.
Long-trusted legend; long-reverenced power; long-practised discipline;
faiths that had ruled the destiny, and sealed the departure, of souls
that could not be told or numbered for multitude; prayers, that from the
lips of the fathers to those of the children had distilled like sweet
waterfalls, sounding through the silence of ages, breaking themselves
into heavenly dew to return upon the pastures of the wilderness; hopes,
that had set the face as a flint in the torture, and the sword as a
flame in the battle, that had pointed the purposes and ministered the
strength of life, brightened the last glances and shaped the last
syllables of death; charities, that had bound together the brotherhoods
of the mountain and the desert, and had woven chains of pitying or
aspiring communion between this world and the unfathomable beneath and
above; and, more than these, the spirits of all the innumerable,
undoubting, dead, beckoning to the one way by which they had been
content to follow the things that belonged unto their peace;--these all
stood on the other side: and the choice must have been a bitter one,
even at the best; but it was rendered tenfold more bitter by the
natural, but most sinful animosity of the two divisions of the Church
against each other.

Sec. XCVI. On one side this animosity was, of course, inevitable. The
Romanist party, though still including many Christian men, necessarily
included, also, all the worst of those who called themselves Christians.
In the fact of its refusing correction, it stood confessed as the Church
of the unholy; and, while it still counted among its adherents many of
the simple and believing,--men unacquainted with the corruption of the
body to which they belonged, or incapable of accepting any form of
doctrine but that which they had been taught from their youth,--it
gathered together with them whatever was carnal and sensual in
priesthood or in people, all the lovers of power in the one, and of ease
in the other. And the rage of these men was, of course, unlimited
ag