subjection of the spiritual to the temporal authority and the achievement of Luther, with all its stormy grandeur still investing it, was in fact a simple realization of this first stage of Catholic decline; for its dogma was at first a collateral affair; and it essentially respected the hierarchy, and seriously attacked only the discipline. If we look more closely at the nature of the changes, we shall find them such as not only propitiated the human passions which exist in clergy as in other men, but confirmed the destruction of sacerdotal independence,-namely, the abolition of clerical celibacy and of general confession. Such being the earliest character of Protestantism, it is easy to see why it made its first appearance among nations remote from the centre of Catholicism, and to whom the Italian tendencies of the papacy during the last two centuries were especially vexatious. At the same time (the time of Luther), the kings of Catholic countries,-of France, Spain, Austria, etc., were as completely the masters of their clergy, and as completely independent of the papal power, as the Protestant princes, though they did not openly arrogate to themselves a useless and absurd spiritual supremacy. But the Lutheran movement, especially when it had reached the Calvinistic phase, wrought powerfully in converting the clergy to such a political subjection, which had been repugnant to them before, but in which they now saw the only security for their social existence amidst the universal passion for religious emancipation. It was then that the coalition of social interests began, between Catholic influence and royal power, which has been erroneously attributed to the best days of Catholicism, when that system was in fact glorious for its antagonism to all temporal power. It is another mistake to suppose that the opposition to human progress is more attributable to modern Catholicism than to Lutheranism, which in its English or Swedish or any other form, is yet more hostile to progress, having never proposed to be independent, but been instituted from the beginning for perpetual subjection. From whatever cause, the Catholic church, finding itself powerless in regard to its highest offices, and restricted to the control of the individual life, with some little remaining influence over the domestic, has applied itself more and more exclusively to the preservation of its own existence by making itself a necessary auxiliary to royalty, in which alone the remains of the life of the monotheistic age were concentrated. It needs no showing that this was a vicious circle, out of which nothing could issue but ruin both to Catholicism and to royalty. Catholicism offered itself as a support precisely because it was itself in need of support; and it lost its popular credit by thus renouncing its ancient and most prominent political office, retaining only the empty power of preachment, which, however sublime in eloquence, was essentially declamatory, and very inoffensive to the now superior power. At the same time, royalty had connected its political fate with a system of doctrines and in stitutions certain to excite in time universal repugnance, intellectual and moral, and doomed to universal and speedy dissolution. The Jesuits. The dissolution was systematized, from the beginning, chiefly by the institution of the society of the Jesuits, which, eminently retrograde in its nature, was founded to serve as a central organ of Catholic resistance to the destruction which threatened on every side. The papacy, of late chiefly engrossed by the interests and cares of its temporal sovereignty, was no longer fit for the necessary opposition to spiritual emancipation; and the Jesuit leaders, who were usually eminent men, assumed, under all modest appearances, the function of the popes, in order to bring into convergence the partial efforts which were more and more scattered by the tendencies of the time. Without them Catholicism could not, it appears to me, have offered any substantial resistance for the last three centuries; but not the less must the Jesuit influence, from its hostility to human progress, be eminently corrupting and contradictory in its character. It engaged all the social influence it could lay hold of in the service of Catholicism, by persuading the enlightened that their own power depended on their support of a system of sacerdotal authority over the vulgar, while they themselves might enjoy a secret emancipation;—a procedure which was possible only as long as such emancipation was exceptional, and sure to become ridiculous when religious liberty should be more widely spread, when, of necessity, Jesuitism must be reduced to an organized mystification, in which every person concerned must be at the same time and for the same purpose deceiver and deceived. Again, by striving for the direction of education, Jesuitism helped to propagate the intellectual movement; for, however imperfect its teachings, they were an apparatus directed against the end of its own institution. Its famous foreign missions offer the same contradiction between the means; for they offered homage to the intellectual, and especially the scientific, development of modern society, which it was their object to contravene; and derived their own spiritual power from that intellectual teaching which they made the means of introducing articles of faith that they at first were compelled to disown or conceal. I need not point out the perils to which such an institution must have been exposed, holding so exceptional a position amidst the Catholic organism, and by the superiority of its special destination provoking the jealousy of all other religious bodies, whose attributes it absorbed, one by one, and whose antipathy became so intense as to neutralize, in the heart of the Catholic clergy themselves, all regret for the final fall of the only possible support of their Church. Jesuitism was indeed the only barrier set up, with any chance of success, against the incursions of religious liberty; Final decay and the Spanish monarchy, as secluded from heresy, of Catholicism. was the only effectual support of Jesuitism. Nothing better than a negative result was given forth by the Council of Trent, as the popes seem to have foreseen, judging by their reluctance to summon and prolong the Assembly, which could only reproduce, after a long and conscientious revision, the Catholic system, with a fruitless admiration of the consistency of all its parts, and the conclusion that, with every conciliatory desire, they could consent to none of the concessions proposed for the sake of peace. I pointed out before that the Franciscans and Dominicans had offered, three centuries earlier, the only real promise of Catholic reformation; and, as they failed, there was no hope. The universal prayer of the Catholic world for the regeneration of the Church had for some time shown that the critical spirit was predominant even there. Thus far advanced towards dissolution, no ground was left to Catholicism but that of resistance to human development; and thus reduced to be a mere party in Europe, it lost not only the power but the desire to fulfil its old destination. Absorbed in the care of its own preservation, degraded by the perpetration of foul and suicidal acts, through its partnership with royalty, and resorting to material repression, its activity of resistance only disclosed its intellectual and moral impotence, and indirectly hastened the decay which it strove to arrest. From the first days of decline to the present,-from the time of Philip II. to that of Bonaparte,-there has been the same struggle between the retrograde instinct of the ancient organization and the spirit of negative progression proper to new social forces: only the situation was at first inevitable; whereas now it is protracted for want of a philosophy appropriate to the actual phase of human development. It does not follow that Catholicism was not illustrated in its decline by many men of eminence, intellectual and moral; but the number rapidly decreased, and the social decay of Catholicism was made manifest in the very men who most adorned it. The finest logic was employed in defending inconsistencies and humiliations, as in the instance of Bossuet; and the virtues of such men as St Carlo Borromeo and St Vincent de Paul had no characteristics which attached them to Catholicism, as must have been the case in earlier times. Their natures must have received an equivalent development, though under a different expression, under any religious sect, or outside of all. We must beware of attributing the vices of hypocrisy and Vices of Pro- hostility to progress to Catholicism alone. From the testantism. moment that Protestantism changed its natural attitude of simple opposition, it shared those vices to the full. Catholicism became retrograde against its nature, in consequence of its subjection to temporal power; and Protestantism, erecting that subjection into a principle, could not but be retrograde in at least an equal degree. For instance, Anglican orthodoxy, rigorously required from the vulgar for the political needs of the coexisting system, could not generate very deep eonvictions and a very high VICES OF PROTESTANTISM. 271 respect among those same Lords of Parliament whose decisions had so often arbitrarily changed various articles of faith, and who must officially claim the regulation of their own belief as one of the essential prerogatives of their order. The forcible repression of religious liberty was, in Catholicism, simply a consequence of its modern disorganization; whereas, it is inherent in the very nature of Protestantism, from its confounding the two kinds of discipline; and it could not but manifest itself as soon as it had the power, as long experience has only too well proved. And this has been the case, not only with primitive Protestantism, through the despotic spirit of Lutheranism towards all that goes beyond it: it has been the case in all the more advanced sects from the moment that power passed into their hands, for however short a time The deist Rousseau proposed the juridical extermination of all atheists; and he is only a fair exemplification of the doctrines which pretend to tolerance while subjecting the spiritual to the temporal order of affairs. Before quitting the study of modern Catholic resistance, I must remark that, so far from being merely hurtful to social improvement, as we are apt to suppose, it has aided political progress for three centuries past. Besides its office in preserving public order, of which I have already said enough, we must consider the social benefit that has accrued from its active opposition to the spread of the Protestant movement. The imperfect operation of the spirit of free inquiry must have retarded the emancipation of the intellect, especially among the multitude, by humouring the indolence of proud human reason and in political matters, Protestantism proposes modifications which, in spite of their insufficiency, keep up a delusive notion of the tendency of society to true regeneration. Thus, Protestant nations after first outstripping their Catholic neighbours, have stood still, in a position further removed than the Catholic nations from any real issue of the revolutionary movement and such would have been the disastrous state of suspension of the whole civilized world, if it had been all pervaded by Protestantism. Instead of the final organic state being made to depend on the indefinite duration of the old organism in that state of halfdecay sanctioned by Protestantism, it is aided by the action of Catholicism in retarding the revolutionary movement, intellectual and political, till it could become decisive in both relations. As for the effect of the critical spirit on the temporal changes of the last three centuries,-we find it at work among Temporal the social powers which gathered round the prepon- dictatorship. derant temporal element, whether it were the royal power, as in France, or the aristocratic power, as in England and some other countries. The only active element in either case was naturally invested with a sort of permanent dictatorship, the establishment of which was so far retarded by religious troubles as not to have been fully characterized till the second half of the seventeenth century, and which remains to this day, notwithstanding its exceptional nature, together with the corresponding social situation; because of the incapacity of the special agents of the transition to conduct it to its issue. This long dictatorship, royal or aristocratic, was at once the consequence and the corrective of the spiritual disorganization, which would otherwise have destroyed society altogether. We shall hereafter see what its influence has been in hastening the development of new social elements, and even aiding their political advent. The operation of the dictatorship, in the one case in Royal and England, and in the other in France, is full of interest Aristocratic. and instruction. Both have equally broken up the feudal equilibrium; but France, from the predominance of the regal element, is nearer to a permanent settlement than England, with its aristocratic system: and the royal element being more indispensable to the issue than the aristocratic, France has been better able to dispense with a peerage than England with a sovereign; so that the aristocratic power has been more subordinated in France than the regal in England. Royalty in France, isolated in the midst of a people bent on emancipation, has opposed less obstruction to progress than the English aristocracy, who, equally disposed to the stationary or retrograde policy, have more power to sustain it, by their closer connection with the people at large. Again, the principle of caste, which in France has long been confined to royalty, is sustained in England by a great number of distinct families, whose continual renewal maintains its vigour, though its character is certainly not ameliorated by the new additions. However proud the English oligarchy may be of their old historical prerogative of making and unmaking kings, the rare exercise of such a privilege could not affect the spirit of the temporal organization so much as the daring permanent power of making nobles which the sovereigns of France appropriated as long ago, and which they have used so recklessly as to make their noblesse almost ridiculous, since the revolutionary phase began. I must observe in this connection that Protestantism has nowhere, and least of all in England, shown itself averse to the spirit of caste, which it has even tended to restore, by re-establishing, as far as possible, the sacerdotal character, of which the Catholic philosophy had deprived it. For one instance, the spirit of Catholicism, opposed to the principle of caste, and favourable to that of capacity, has always opposed the succession of women to the throne or to feudal authority; whereas official Protestantism, in England, Sweden, etc., has sanctioned the political existence of queens and even of peeresses: a contrast which is the more remarkable from Protestantism having made royalty a genuine national papacy. In both the cases of temporal dictatorship, Protestantism has done something to retard the disorganization which in other re |