compromise between the "new" and the
"old" religions was definitely closed. The anathema of the Roman Church
had fallen upon all the fundamental doctrines for which the Reformers
had contended and died; the right of free discussion within the limits
of the creeds, which had given room for the speculations of the medieval
philosophers, was henceforth curtailed and confined; and the definitions
of the schoolmen were for ever exalted by the authority of Rome into
dogmas of the Church. The Latin Church, which, by combining the
tradition of the Roman centralized organization with a great elasticity
in practice and in the interpretation of doctrine, had hitherto been the
moulding force of civilization in the West, is henceforth more or less
in antagonism to that civilization, which advances in all its
branches--in science, in literature, in art--to a greater or less degree
outside of and in spite of her, until in its ultimate and most
characteristic developments it falls under the formal condemnation of
the pope, formulated in the famous Syllabus of 1864. Considered from the
standpoint of the world outside, the Roman Church is, no less than the
Protestant communities, merely one of the sects into which Western
Christendom has been divided--the most important and widespread, it is
true, but playing in the general life and thought of the world a part
immeasurably less important than that filled by the Church before the
Reformation, and one in no sense justifying her claim to be considered
as the sole inheritor of the tradition of the pre-Reformation Church.

If this be true of the Roman Catholic Church, it is still more so of the
other great communities and confessions which emerged from the
controversies of the Reformation. Of these the Anglican Church held most
closely to the tradition of Catholic organization; but she has never
made any higher claim than to be one of "the three branches of the
Catholic Church," a claim repudiated by Rome and never formally admitted
by the Church of the East. The Protestant churches established on the
continent, even where--as in the case of the Lutherans--they approximate
more closely than the official Anglican Church to Roman doctrine and
practice, make no such claim. The Bible is for them the real source of
authority in doctrine; their organization is part and parcel of that of
the state. They are, in fact, the state in its religious aspect, and as
such are territorial or national, not Cat