is ridiculous in any man to declaim against a phenomenon so natural, so inevitable, and above all so advantageous, designating it a succession of usurpations of temporal power." Where all was chaos, there could be properly no usurpation. The right to rule fell where there was ability to rule. It is dishonest to try such times by the standard of a settled and well ordered social state. The power to regenerate society, in the middle ages, lay wholly in the Church. On her devolved accordingly, as by Divine commission, the sovereign care of society and the duty of training it for its proper destiny. Was this providential trust then abused in its actual administration? Did the Church exercise her guardianship over the infant nations of Europe, in such a way as instead of assisting to repress their upward tendencies, in such a way as to retard rather than to advance their progress in true civilization? We have seen already that she was a fountain of order and law; that she brought society into regular and settled form; that she caused the wilderness to become a fruitful field; that she curbed the passions of men, and set bounds to their violence; that she led them to dwell in families, and to cultivate the domestic virtues; that she inoculated manners with a new spirit of gentleness and peace; that she raised the standard of morality, and purified the public conscience, far beyond all that was known in the ancient world; that she established a reign and fashion of benevolence, such as had not previously entered the wildest dreams of philanthropy. We have seen all this, and have felt that a power so employed could not well be at war with the best interests of humanity. But was it after all the power only of a humane and well disposed master towards his slaves, or say even of a father towards his sons, who at the same time is bent on holding them always in full subjection to his own will, and so takes care that their education shall not be allowed to lead them either to the knowledge or to the free use of their personal rights? Did this Holy Mother, in the midst of all her wonderfully powerful and salutary educational activity, still show herself faithless and selfish in the whole trust, by resisting the general diffusion of knowledge and the legitimate progress of freedom? The supposition is in its own nature most unnatural and improbable, and to compare it with history, as already said, is at once to find it absolutely false. The Church has never been the deliberate enemy either of liberty or of let

ters.

Here naturally rises at once the thought of the religius intolerance so often charged to the account of the old Catholic Church, the persecutions she has allowed against heretics and

infidels, the horrors in particular of the Inquisition. "It is only necessary to pronounce the word intolerance," says Balmes, "to raise in the minds of some people all sorts of black and horrible ideas." Institutions and men of past times are condemned without appeal, the moment they come under the sound of this reproach. No pains are taken for the most part to understand the real posture of the past, or to judge it according to its own connections and relations. And yet what can be more unfair than this? How easily may any institution be covered with disgrace, if only its inconveniences and evils are brought into view and every consideration suppressed that might speak in its favor. By fixing on certain points only in the annals of the human mind, the history of science may be made the history of folly, and even of crime. So in the case before us. "The spirit of the age, particular circumstances, and an order of things quite different from ours, are all forgotten, and the history of the religious intolerance of Catholics is composed by taking care to condense into a few pages, and to paint in the blackest colors," cases of cruelty and severity diligently collected from different countries and centuries. Events wide apart are made to unite in a single impression, without the least regard to intervening scenery. It is easy in this way to bring out wholesale judg ments. But such judgments are of small account in the end for the cause of truth. This question of toleration too, as all thinking men know, is in its own nature by no means of so easy settlement as this summary way of looking at the matter implies. Without entering into it here however, it is enough to know that a wide difference in regard to it has come to exist between the present time and the past. A spirit of toleration now prevails, right or wrong, which in former ages was unknown. But is this due to Protestantism, or as is sometimes said to modern philosophy? Not at all. It is a fact slowly brought to pass by the force of circumstances. "The multitude of religions, infidelity, indifference, the improvement of manners, the lassitude produced by wars,-industrial and commercial organization, which every day becomes more powerful in society,-communication rendered more frequent among men by means of travelling-the diffusion of ideas by the press; such are the causes which have produced in Europe that universal tolerance which has taken possession of all, and has been established in fact when it could not be by law. These causes, as it is easy to observe, are of different kinds; no doctrine can pretend to an exclusive influence; they are the result of a thousand different influences, acting simultaneously on the development of civilization."

We are glad to see, that while our author protests against the injustice of trying the opinions and institutions of past ages by the altogether different order of thought that has come to prevail in our own, and finds a relative apology even for the tribunal of the Inquisition itself in the social circumstances under which it appeared and prevailed, he does not feel himself bound at all to make common cause with the crimes that have been perpetrated in the name of christianity against supposed heretics. "The Massacre of St. Bartholomew," he tells us, "and other atrocities committed in the name of religion, ought not to trouble the apologists of religion. To render her responsible for all that has been done in her name, would be to act with manifest injustice. Man is endowed with so strong and lively a sense of the excellence of virtue, that he endeavors to cover the greatest crimes with her mantle; would it be reasonable to banish virtue from the earth on that account? There are, in the history of mankind, terrible periods, where a fatal giddiness seizes upon the mind; rage, influenced by disorder, blinds the intellect and changes the heart; evil is called good, and good evil; the most horrible attempts are made under the most respectable names. Historians and philosophers, in treating of such periods, should know what ought to be their line of conduct; strictly accurate in the narration of such facts, they ought to beware of drawing from them a judgment as to the prevailing ideas end institutions. Society then resembles a man in a state of delirium. We should ill judge of the ideas, character and conduct, of such a man, from what he says and does in that deplorable condition. What party, in such calamitous times, can boast of not having committed great crimes? If we fix our eyes on the period just mentioned, do we not see the leaders of both parties assassinated by treason?Let us throw a veil over these catastrophes, over these afflicting proofs of the misery and perversity of the human heart."-P. 204.

It is noted as a curious fact, well worthy of serious consideration, that the charge of being hostile to the right political progress of society has been brought against Catholicity, at different times, from directly opposite points of view. Formerly the fashion was to represent it as the enemy of kings, because it made the seat of power to be primarily in the people, and taught that temporal sovereigns may be resisted if need be, in certain circumstances, even to the extent of revolution itself. But since the revolutionary spirit has come to be in the ascendant, that old tone is found to be widely changed; and the very same power that was held before to be at the bottom of a conspiracy against

all other thrones, in favor of the universal supremacy of the Pope, is now declared to be in league with the general cause of monarchy to crush and kill every motion of liberty among the people. The radicals of Europe, we know, are full of this cry; and among ourselves also it may be said to be a reigning opin ion, that the religious power in question is constitutionally op posed to everything like republicanism, and it is easily taken for granted accordingly that it has entered into an infamous pact with kings to oppress, enslave, and degrade the unfortunate hu man race. We pretend not here to try at all the true merits of this latter judgment. We refer to it simply as something curiously in contrast with the other reproach of an earlier time.

But whatever may be the actual spirit of Rome as it now stands, it is perfectly certain that the reigning influence of the Church, in the ages before the Reformation, went in favor of sound political liberty throughout, and that it was under her auspices mainly and especially that this interest gained ground continually more and more in the onward course of modern civilization. This is very successfully shown, we think, in the latter. portion of Balmes' work; and we only wish that these chapters in particular might be read and studied by those, who without any historical knowledge whatever so flippantly pretend to settle the whole subject in just the contrary way. Here are facts, which these wholesale revilers of religion would do well at least to look in the face, if it were only to set aside the force they seem to have, and thus show their own zeal to be intelligent where it is now so deplorably blind.

The great problem in politics, is to determine the proper relation between authority and freedom, the idea of duties in one direction and the idea of rights in another. This connects itself again closely with the question, What is the origin of civil pow er? It so happens that a good deal of attention has come to be fixed on this subject, just at the present time in our own country, by the late action of the General Government in regard to slavery. In one direction, we hear views maintained, in the name of individual conscience, that go to upset civil authority altogether. These proceed openly or tacitly on the assumption, that government is a mere social contract on the part of the people, to be set aside by them at their own pleasure. On the opposite side it is more soundly contended, that government comes from God, and that obedience to it is a duty for its own sake; though it must be confessed that this doctrine, in the hands at least of some of its republican advocates, is pressed so far as to sound very much like a revival of the old " divine right" theory

of kings, (commonly taken heretofore to have gone to the tomb of the Capulets,) and savors strongly of being the fruit of Political Economy, rather than the genuine outbirth of Political Ethics. But now, be this as it may, one thing is certain. This whole better doctrine, of which the New York Observer for instance has been making a merit over against the too consistently Puritan tendency of the N. Y. Independent, and for the defence of which more than one eloquent preacher has succeeded in winning golden compliments from Daniel Webster and other distinguished civilians, is one that belongs in all its fulness to the old Catholic Church of the middle ages, and that was applied by her to the development of the present civilization of Europe, we may say from the very start, not in a blind and clumsy form, but with a depth and breadth of discrimination the like of which is not to be found anywhere in the best of these modern efforts.

The Church has ever disowned the idea of a social contract, as lying at the foundation of government. Civil power, she tells us, comes from God, and is to be obeyed from a regard to his will. The old writers are full of the most clear instruction in regard to all this. Aquinas in particular, it would seem, has explained and guarded the subject on all sides in the most masterly way.

On the other hand however, this divine right of government is not taken to be the special prerogative of a class, rulers separately considered, but is made to spring from the political body in its general character. The common doctrine of the church has been, that such power resides in the community directly and by natural right, but in kings and other rulers merely indirectly and by human right, unless God has given it to particular persons by his own direct nomination. No mistake can be greater, than that by which the exaggeration of the authority of rulers, at the cost of popular rights, is held to be the natural and necessary doctrine of Catholicism, as distinguished from the genius of Protestantism. History plainly teaches a different lesson. It was Protestantism in the beginning of its career, that stood forward strangely enough as the flatterer and helper of kings. In its opposition to the Papacy, it was led naturally to exalt to an incredible degree the pretensions of the civil power. This was appealed to against the religious power, and encouraged to usurp the supreme control of ecclesiastical affairs. The regal authori ty was thus assisted powerfully in the direction it had already begun to take, through the decline of the feudal system and the still unripe character of the popular element, towards an undue absorption into itself of all other political forces. It became the