garded the effort of
Protestantism to throw individuals back upon themselves as merely
tending to empty their minds of all valuable contents, and to deliver
them over to their own individual caprice. Private judgment and popular
government are to him only other forms of expression for intellectual
and political anarchy; and his remedy for the moral diseases of modern
times is the restoration of that division of the spiritual and temporal
authorities, which existed in the Middle Ages. But there is another
aspect of the Protestant movement and of these apparently anarchical
doctrines, to which Comte pays no attention. Catholicism, as we have
seen, had developed one aspect of Christianity, until, by its exclusive
prominence, the principle of Christianity itself was on the point of
being lost. It had changed the opposition of laity and clergy, world and
Church, from a relative into an absolute one; it had presented its
doctrine, not as something which the spirit of the individual may
ultimately verify for itself, but as something to which it must
permanently submit without any verification. It had made the worship
into an _opus operatum_ instead of a means through which the feelings of
the worshipper could be at once drawn out and expressed. Now, it is as
opposed to these tendencies that the Protestant movement had its highest
importance. It would, no doubt, be intellectual anarchy, for every
individual to claim to judge for himself, on subjects for which he has
not the requisite training or discipline; but it is a slavery scarcely
less corrupting in its effect than anarchy, when he is made to regard
the difference between himself and his teachers as a permanent and
absolute one. In the former case, he has no sufficient feeling of his
want to make him duly submissive to teaching; in the latter, he has no
sufficient consciousness of his capacity to awake a due reaction of his
thought upon the matter received from his teachers. Again, the decline
of the sovereignty of the people would be the negation of all rule, if
it meant that the uninstructed many should govern themselves by their
own insight, and that the instructed few should simply be their servants
and their instruments. But where the people are not recognized as the
ultimate source of power, where their consent is not in any regular way
made necessary to the proceedings of their governors, they are by that
very fact kept in a perpetual tutelage, and cannot possibly fee