tatistics are unnecessary, but we cannot but remember the temples to
God raised in other ages and other lands, which endure to this hour,
imperishable witnesses to a truth which is "the light of life". What
that truth is, we shall see later. But when we remember the great
pre-Christian systems of the East and of Egypt, and the very stones dug
out of the earth cry aloud in witness to the eternal truths, God, Soul,
Hereafter; when we realise the devotion of martyred Israel to the faith
of their fathers, and the great Mohammedan revolt against the
dogmatical puerilities of the sixth century; when, I say, we remember
that one and all endure to this hour, and in unimpaired vigour, and
still more, when that absorbingly interesting study known as the
science of Comparative Religion has shown us that of orthodoxy is true
what is true of all religious systems--that it enjoys a monopoly of
nothing save of errors peculiar to itself, and that of its doctrines,
all that is true is not new, and all that is new is not true--we are in
a fairer position to estimate its precise place and influence in the
world and the sources from which it has drawn its inspiration.

Even of the comparatively few in the vast family of humanity who own
its supremacy, how many can repeat its shibboleths in common? And if
disunion, the true mark of error, be at work among them, can we believe
that the future is reserved for it? It is unquestionable that the
cultivated intellect of the Continent is profoundly estranged from the
version prevalent there, while it is only the spirit of compromise, so
characteristic of the race, carried into the domain of dogmatism which
prevents a similar insurrection in England. If the sacerdotal lion can
lie down side by side with the Broad Church lambs, it is only because
the wicked world, symbolised for the moment by the strong arm of the
law and the public sense of decency, curbs the ferocity of heresy
hunters and bids them look to their manners lest some worse thing
befall them. It is felt instinctively that the popular phylacteries,
the peculiar trappings in which Divine truth has been set forth in
England, are not worth discussion among serious men.

And this will help us to estimate at its true value the argument which
lost John Henry Newman to rational religion and won him for Roman
Catholicism. What finally decided him that the Ultramontane version of
religion was the true one, was the famous _Securus judicat