It must be apt to
discern the spiritual shortcomings or illusions of powers that in the
practical sphere may be beneficent. And this without any notion of
favoring or injuring, in the practical sphere, one power or the other;
without any notion of playing off, in this sphere, one power against the
other. When one looks, for instance, at the English Divorce Court,--an
institution which perhaps has its practical conveniences, but which in the
ideal sphere is so hideous; an institution which neither makes divorce
impossible nor makes it decent; which allows a man to get rid of his wife,
or a wife of her husband, but makes them drag one another first, for the
public edification, through a mire of unutterable infamy,--when one looks
at this charming institution, I say, with its crowded trials, its
newspaper reports, and its money compensations, this institution in which
the gross unregenerate British Philistine has indeed stamped an image of
himself, one may be permitted to find the marriage theory of Catholicism
refreshing and elevating. Or when Protestantism, in virtue of its supposed
rational and intellectual origin, gives the law to criticism too
magisterially, criticism may and must remind it that its pretensions, in
this respect, are illusive and do it harm; that the Reformation was a
moral rather than an intellectual event; that Luther's theory of grace no
more exactly reflects the mind of the spirit than Bossuet's philosophy of
history reflects it; and that there is no more antecedent probability of
the Bishop of Durham's stock of ideas being agreeable to perfect reason
than of Pope Pius the Ninth's. But criticism will not on that account
forget the achievements of Protestantism in the practical and moral
sphere; nor that, even in the intellectual sphere, Protestantism, though
in a blind and stumbling manner, carried forward the Renaissance, while
Catholicism threw itself violently across its path.

I lately heard a man of thought and energy contrasting the want of ardor
and movement which he now found amongst young men in England with what he
remembered in his own youth, twenty years ago. "What reformers we were
then!" he exclaimed; "what a zeal we had! how we canvassed every
institution in Church and State, and were prepared to remodel them all on
first principles!" He was inclined to regret, as a spiritual flagging, the
lull that he saw. I am disposed rather to regard it as a pause in which
the turn to a new mode o