here were grave
ecclesiastics, fathoming the depths of free-will, predestination,
election. Investing the clergy with a mysterious superiority, the Church
asserted the equality of the laity from the king to the beggar before
God. It disregarded wealth and birth, and opened a career for all. Its
influence over the family and domestic relations was felt through all
classes. It fixed paternity by a previous ceremony; it enforced the rule
that a wife passes into the family of her husband, and hence it followed
that legitimate children belong to the father, illegitimate to the
mother. It compelled women to domestic life, shut them out from the
priesthood, and tried to exclude them from government. In a worldly
sense, the mistake that Rome committed was this: she attempted to
maintain an intellectual immobility in the midst of an advancing social
state. She saw not that society could no more be stopped in its career
through her mere assertion that it could not and should not move, than
that the earth could be checked in its revolution merely because she
protested that it was at rest. She tried, first by persuasion and then
by force, to arrest the onward movement, but she was overborne,
notwithstanding her frantic resistance, by the impetuous current. Very
different would it have been had the Italian statesmen boldly put
themselves in the van of progress, and, instead of asserting an
immutability and infallibility, changed their dogmas and maxims as the
progress of events required. Europe need not have waited for Arabs and
Jews.

[Sidenote: Loss of power in Church organizations.] In describing these
various facts, I have endeavoured to point out impressively how the
Church, so full of vigour at first, contained within itself the seeds of
inevitable decay. From the period when it came into collision with the
intellectual and moral elements, the origin of which we have traced, and
which conspired together for its overthrow, it exhibited a gradual
decline; first losing its influence upon nations, and ceasing to be in
them a principle of public action; next, witnessing the alienation of
the higher and educated classes, the process descending downward through
the social scale, therein retracing the steps of its advance. When
ecclesiasticism became so weak as to be unable to regulate international
affairs, and was supplanted by diplomacy, in the castle the physician
was more than a rival for the confessor, in the town the mayor was