ascendency
extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the
Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which, a century hence, may not
improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits
Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a
hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all
other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions.
Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long
dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments
and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the
world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end
of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot
on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian
eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped
in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigor
when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast
solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the
ruins of St. Paul's.

We often hear it said that the world is constantly becoming more and
more enlightened, and that this enlightening must be favorable to
Protestantism and unfavorable to Catholicism. We wish that we could
think so. But we see great reason to doubt whether this be a
well-founded expectation. We see that during the last two hundred and
fifty years the human mind has been in the highest degree active, that
it has made great advances in every branch of natural philosophy, that
it has produced innumerable inventions tending to promote the
convenience of life, that medicine, surgery, chemistry, engineering,
have been very greatly improved, that government, police, and law have
been improved, though not to so great an extent as the physical
sciences. But we see that, during these two hundred and fifty years,
Protestantism has made no conquests worth speaking of. Nay, we believe
that, as far as there has been a change, that change has, on the whole,
been in favor of the Church of Rome. We cannot, therefore, feel
confident that the progress of knowledge will necessarily be fatal to a
system which has, to say the least, stood its ground in spite of the
immense progress made by the human race in knowledge since the days of
Queen Elizabeth.

Indeed, the argument which we are considering seems to us to be founded
on