rationalist. He rejects the notion that there was any. thing unique or supernatural in the career of Jesus of Nazareth; he would, one imagines, not dissent from the harsh statement of Loisy that the historian does not banish God from history; he never meets Him there. And yet he values the creeds, the sacraments, and the liturgy of the Catholic Church, which are based on the belief that in the historical Christ dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.' The Catholic worship is for him, we must suppose, symbolic: it represents spiritual truths which can move our affections and imaginations only when they are translated into these images. Now we must all admit that we see through a glass darkly, and know only in part. But is it not a matter of experience that as soon as as we see that an alleged miracle is only a parable, it loses its value for us as a miracle, and becomes only an aid to the imagination, or more often even a hindrance? To the 'vulgar Christian' (the phrase is less offensive in German), Catholicism guarantees facts, past, present, and future. To the man in the street the alternative is fact or fraud; and in view of the powers claimed by the priesthood, which depend on the factual truth of their doctrines, it is difficult to deny that this is the alternative. Heiler seems to say in effect, 'All that the rationalists say is true, but it does not matter.' But we live in a scientific age, which will not readily agree that the question is irrelevant whether an event which is presented to us as immensely important ever went through the form of taking place.

Heiler traces the development of post-Tridentine Catholicism with growing disapprobation. After the Reformation the Church became narrower, and no longer produced men of genius like Augustine, or even like Thomas Aquinas. Its most outstanding figures are Ignatius of Loyola and Alfonso of Liguori, in whom 'vulgar Catholicism' overwhelms the mystical and evangelical elements of Christianity. The Prussianism of Ignatius is briefly but sufficiently sketched. In Alfonso of Liguori Catholicism seems to him to have descended to a still lower plane. This modern Catholic saint is the author of the statement, 'It is difficult to be saved through Christ, but easy through Mary.' His extrava

gant Papalism is the main reason why his works, which Döllinger stigmatised as 'a magazine of errors and lies,' have been made authoritative, and exalted to the level of the earlier doctors of the Church.

There is much in this book which we must leave without comment, though it is full of interest-a sympachetic elucidation of the liturgy, discipline, and instiutions of the great Church which the author quitted with so much sorrow. In some ways, these chapters are the most illuminating in the whole volume. But our pace is needed for a judgment on the book as a whole. We have dealt with the Modernist attitude towards history and dogma, and have not disguised our coniction that Rome would have committed suicide by admitting and sanctioning a disintegrating philosophy f religion, the tendency of which would have been to change Catholicism into a religion of a different type, epriving it both of the advantage which gave it the Pictory over Isis and Mithra-its basis in history, and of ts philosophy, in which it affiliated itself to the great Hellenic tradition. Nevertheless, Tyrrell was right in aying that the Church of Rome stands at the crossoads. It is encumbered by an immense mass of falsified history and antiquated science, which it cannot repudiate, and which it can no longer impose upon its dherents, except where its priests still control and stifle education. The plea that truths of fact and truths of aith are different things, which do not conflict because hey are on different planes, certainly suggests a way out. It is a way which would lead the Roman Church o destruction; but perhaps no other solution of the problem is in sight. Mere repression may force men to ansay; it cannot make them unsee.

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It remains to consider whether the history of Chrisianity in general, and of Western Catholicism in particular, does not suggest rather different conclusions rom those which lie at the root of Heiler's position. And first of all, the unwelcome fact must be faced, that o find a form of religion which shall be acceptable to all the great races of mankind, divided as they are by mmemorial differences of mental structure and ancestral customs, is a problem which, if not insoluble, has never yet been solved. The Gospel of Christ Himself, we may

gladly admit, speaks in his own tongue to the Greek and the Roman, the Teuton and the Celt, the white man and the black. But this cannot be said of any institutional Church. Just as Buddhism, in gaining China and Burma, lost India, the home of its origin, so the Christian Church, in gaining for Christ the whole domain of Græco-Roman culture, lost its power of appealing to the Semitic nations. It became the religion of the Roman Empire. Christians may hope for a time when Asia and Africa may own allegiance to the Founder of their faith; but the historian will not cherish the expectation that the people of these continents will ever become adherents of any European Church. To speak plainly, an universal Church is as much a chimæra as an universal empire. The double dream of an universal Roman Church and an universal Roman Empire floated before the minds of men in the Middle Ages; but now that man knows his home from end to end, the Roman Empire seems a small thing, and the Latin Church a smaller. One who has been brought up under the magic of the Roman name, like Heiler, may ask, Why should Rome not be the capital of the world-religion? Others will more reasonably ask, Why should it?

6

For Latin Catholicism is an institution much narrower even than European Christianity. It is the religion of the Latin-speaking Mediterraneans, and of the barbarian invaders whom they were able to assimilate. What Heiler calls vulgar Catholicism is the ancestral religion of south-western Europe. It borrowed what it could understand of Greek philosophy; it neglected and lost Greek science; it thoroughly understood and eagerly developed the theory and practice of Roman Imperialism Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento.' As long as northern Europe was under the tutelage of the more advanced nations of the south, it remained Catholic but there were many precursors of the Reformation in England and Germany, and the great cleavage of the 16th century so nearly followed racial lines that it bears the character of a Nordic secession. There is no likeli hood whatever that the northern Europeans will ever return to the Italian allegiance. It is curious that Heiler does not seem to have considered the racial limits of Romanism, though history has marked them out very

clearly. He is obsessed by the ideal of one fold and one shepherd.

'The tragedy of Catholicism,' then, is not to be found in its failure to maintain the character of a complexio oppositorum, a combination of opposite tendencies, for this was never a part of the Catholic ideal. Nor is there any tragedy in its failure to establish a world-empire, for no such empire can ever exist. We shall find the tragedy rather in the political evolution of the Western Church, which Sabatier has described with much insight. Rome is to-day the only surviving autocracy, the one remaining example of a type of government which has had a notable past, and may have a future, but which for the present has been discredited and abandoned in all secular States. This unique position makes the Latin Church a very interesting object of study for the political philosopher, but the means by which this centralised despotism was acquired, consolidated, and perpetuated furnish grounds for an unanswerable indictment against those who claim any peculiar sanctity for the Catholic Church as an institution. It is the Church as a political organisation which has made so many enemies; and unhappily the will to power has infected every branch of the institution, determining doctrine no less than policy. The Roman Empire, as is well known, became more centralised and more despotic until it fell to pieces. Both the Court and the system of government approached more nearly to the Asiatic type, chiefly because only a very strong central government could cope with the evils of prætorianism, which was wrecking civilisation by repeated pronunciamentos. The same tendency showed itself in the Church, though the problems of ecclesiastical government were different. As Sabatier says, 'after having been in apostolic times a pure democracy, the Church became a great federation governed by its bishops; this was an aristocratic regime. Then the primacy of Rome turned it into a monarchy, at first tempered by the Councils, afterwards more and more centralised, omnipotent, and finally absolute.' The same political necessity, he says, determined the whole evolution, which culminated in the dogma of infallibility. But we are tempted to ask whether this steady movement towards a complete autocracy was inevitable from

the first, or whether, quite early in Church history, there was a parting of the ways, when the alternative course might have been taken. I shall not attempt to decide this very difficult question, but a few considerations may be offered.

It is certain that the Gospel of Christ levels all institutional barriers, whether sacred or secular, by ignoring them. Faith and love are the only and sufficient passports to membership of the 'little flock.' But even within the circle of the Twelve instances are recorded of the characteristic Jewish intolerance, and the early Church narrated with satisfaction how St John fled from a public bath when the heretic Cerinthus entered it. Jewish fanaticism combined with Roman imperialism to create the idea of a Church world-wide de iure, which regarded all dissentients as rebels and traitors, to be justly subjected to persecution here and eternal torments hereafter. This intolerance was not Greek in origin, though it is significant that Plato, who sketched with marvellous foresight the forms which his philosophic Republic must assume, sanctioned coercive measures against atheists and others, and even provided for a Nocturnal Council,' terribly like the Inquisition. Plutarch tells us that Cleanthes the Stoic 'thought that the Greeks ought to prosecute Aristarchus for impiety, for moving the centre of the universe; because Aristarchus tried to account for the phenomena by the hypothesis that the firmament is stationary, and that the earth revolves round the sun in an oblique circle, at the same time rotating on its own axis.' But this precursor of Galileo was a Greek, and escaped the fate of the Renaissance astronomer.

We have to account for the instinctive fear of the Church which the imperial government soon began to manifest. The pagans despised the Christians as & 'tenebrosa et lucifugax natio,' but at the same time they considered them an association of a peculiarly dangerous kind. They were not so foolish as to suppose them to be social revolutionaries, though this has been suggested; but they saw in the Church an imperium in imperio, independent of the empire and ostentatiously indifferent to it. They feared that the triumph of the Church would mean the disappearance of the old civilisation, and that