'a shapeless darkness would destroy all the beauty of the world.' The effect of the persecutions was to foster a spirit which would have been easily exorcised by a different treatment. At Alexandria the adherents of different religions met in friendly intercourse and attended the same university lectures; a Christian philosophy soon sprang up which did not wish to deny its debt to the old culture. But in the Church as a whole authority was becoming more rigorous and more centralised; the Church was preparing for its final struggle for recognition and supremacy. The historian may think that what happened was inevitable. The effect certainly was that Roman imperialism received a new lease of life under the form which Celsus and Julian would have considered the least desirable.

The Concordat under Constantine pointed to the form of government called Cæsaro-papism, in which the secular and sacred hierarchies support each other. This was in fact the Byzantine system; but the Eastern patriarchates, for various reasons, remained autocephalous'; there has never been an Eastern Pope. The jealousy of the Tsars even deprived the Russian patriarch of his power, which was put into commission under the Holy Synod. But the crumbling and collapse of the Western Empire left the Roman Church supreme, or only confronted by the embarrassed phantom of the Holy Roman Empire. It is interesting to observe how little the progress of the Papacy was retarded by the Pornocracy' and other scandals of the Middle Ages. The feudal idea played into the hands of the Pope. In a state of society where every one was some one else's 'man,' there must be one supreme head on earth of the Church.

The Renaissance seemed to promise a stable alliance between Christianity and humanism, which after bringing to perfection a glorious Catholic art, might at last have ended the conflict between orthodoxy and natural science. But Northern Europe, now becoming conscious of its right to political and spiritual independence, revolted against the Roman obedience, and the savage wars of religion followed. They ended in a permanent cleavage on racial lines, and Rome became distinctively the Church of the Latins. In the struggle with Protestantism some abuses were remedied; but Heiler

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is right when he says that the whole character of the Roman Church was changed for the worse. Not only Protestantism but modern civilisation gradually became the enemy, till in 1864 a Papal Bull pronounced that, 'If any one says that the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself with progress, liberalism, and modern civilisation, let him be anathema'; and thirteen years later the same infallible authority condemned the theory of evolution as contradicted by history, by the tradition of all peoples, by exact science, by observed facts, and by reason itself; it is in truth not worth refutation.' It goes without saying that no Protestant Church would wish or dare to use such language, which seems to mark the Roman Church as a home of lost causes, a survivor of modes of thought which the civilised world has outgrown. But history has shown that the Papal hierarchy has never been deficient in astuteness and political wisdom. It is not, and seldom has been, interested in theological questions as such; its motives are purely political. And it stands committed, on political grounds, to this truceless war against all the ideas of the modern world. These declarations, let us remember, belong to the generation which put the coping-stone on the Papal autocracy.

The policy, apparently, is to regard all independent thinkers as already lost, and to bring the rest under a tighter discipline. The discipline, as is well known, is not strictly enforced upon the laity, who are practically invited to take what suits them in the Catholic system, and only to abstain from contradicting the rest. The officers, the priests, are to be bound to implicit obedience, even if they are ordered to swear that black is white. 'La chiesa non è un credo, la chiesa è una disciplina'; from the private soldiers loyalty only is exacted. It is true that the Canons say: Nec sufficit ut obedientia sit externa, sed etiam interna esse debet, neque contenta obsequioso silentio'; but this is an ideal, and practically means only that doubts must be crushed out like the suggestions of sensuality. This, and not any particular doctrines, is the real essence of Catholicism. As Mark Pattison said:

'Those rites and those doctrines which have made noise in the Roman controversy are those which are least of the essence of Romanism. The Virgin and the Saints, Reliques,

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Images, Purgatory and Masses-these bywords with the vulgar and unthinking are powerless decorations or natural developments. The one essential principle of the Catholic system is the control of the individual conscience by an authority or law placed without it, and exercised over it by men assuming to act in the name of heaven.'

3t Autocracy and the claim of universal empire go together. It is necessary for the Roman Church to discredit completely all other forms of Christianity, denying any efficacy to their rites, and threatening all their members with eternal damnation, without respect to their moral characters. The only loophole by which a Protestant can hope for the mercy of God is by the plea of 'invincible ignorance.'

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From the institutional and professional point of view, the Roman system has very obvious advantages, so long as the laity can be kept on the level of culture which is favourable to belief in magical or supernatural powers. In backward communities, where the strength of Catholicism lies, the priests still exercise considerable influence, which is not sensibly impaired by declarations of war against modern science. The one essential thing is that the hierarchy should not lose its control of primary education.

The rigid discipline of the Church is also a source of great political strength. Protestantism has no wish to influence the political action of citizens; there is no Protestant vote. Nor do the Protestant Churches, as a rule, attempt to intimidate the press, to work for their own ends through the jury system, or to control town councils. All these things the Roman Church does as a matter of course. It makes bitter enemies; but it can sextort bargains from governments, suppress adverse comments in newspapers, injure opponents and help friends. It is significant that no one has yet exposed the wide-reaching influence which the Vatican used on the side of the Central Powers during the war.

Even more significant is the disposition to turn towards Rome, whenever a nation feels itself to be in danger of internal disruption. In France between 1871 and 1914 there was a revulsion against the ideas of 1789,' under which the country seemed to be disintegrating, and a disposition to look for national redemption to what was

sometimes called the hierarchical idea. This movement was especially represented by men of letters, several of whom rallied to Catholicism, more, it would seem, from patriotism than from real religious conviction. They believed that the Church was the only force which could consolidate the nation and check fissiparous tendencies. So Heiler quotes one of the most distinguished Liberal theologians in Germany' as saying, 'The Catholic Church is the only salvation for our poor fatherland.' The real strength of the Roman Church lies in its wonderful organisation. It is quite possible that if international revolutionary conspiracies become really menacing, European civilisation may find no other protector than 'the Black International,' round which all supporters of law and order may, in terror of a general upheaval, gather themselves. If this ever happens, the Church will once more have the support of the educated portion of society, and may even ally itself again with humanism and science, and so recover from the blunders of the last four centuries.

This, however, is not likely to happen except in the Latin countries. In England it is hardly conceivable. Our people are not prone to revolution, and are conspicuous for a sturdy independence which is the very antithesis of the Catholic spirit. Even before the Reformation the English were not contented subjects of a foreign Church, and to suppose that they will ever submit themselves to an Italian priest is the dream of a few bigoted ecclesiastics. Our national character, which is based upon a chivalric ideal-the code of a 'gentleman '-is very far removed from the qualities of the Latin races. Our weekday religion is a religion of honour, truthfulness, generosity, and fair play, and no rival ideal in which these qualities hold at best a very subordinate place, has any chance of being honoured and accepted by the English. Prof. Santayana, himself a Spaniard by descent, recognised very clearly the fundamental differences between the English and the Latin temperament, after spending two or three years in this country. 'If the Englishman likes to call himself a Catholic, it is a fad like a thousand others, to which his inner man, so seriously playful, is prone to lend itself. He may go over to Rome on a spiritual tour. . . but if he is converted

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really and becomes a Catholic at heart, he is no longer the man he was. Words cannot measure the chasm which must henceforth separate him from everything at home. For a modern Englishman, with freedom and experiment and reserve in his blood, to go over to Rome is essential suicide; the inner man must succumb first. Such an Englishman might become a saint, but only by becoming a foreigner.'

No one supposes that Protestantism as we have known it in the 19th century has a great future, and it may well be that in the externals of worship there will be less difference between northern and southern Europe a hundred years hence than there is to-day. But each country must develop on its own lines, in religious no less than in secular institutions. The system of independent national churches, which to Heiler appears a scandal, is probably more hopeful than the idea of a single central authority or a world-wide ecclesiastical polity. Christ spoke of one flock,' not of 'one fold'; the Vulgate unum ovile lends itself to a theory of the Church which cannot claim divine authority. Mutual recognition between the Churches is possible and desirable; political amalgamation is neither possible nor desirable.

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For some of us, the most valuable part of Latin Christianity, next to the gentle piety which it often shelters, is that theological or philosophical tradition against which the Modernists are in sharp revolt. It is not necessarily connected with the obsolete science and popular mythology which it has incorporated and which it endeavours to defend. The whole idea of the supernatural as a higher order' dovetailed into the natural order is extraneous to the philosophy on which Catholic theology rests. But much more alien to this philosophy is the anti-intellectualism of the last thirty years. This new metaphysic is trying to support itself by appealing to the new psychology, as we see in another remarkable German book of last year, Otto's Das Heilige.' But it is, in our opinion, irreconcilable with the Christian view of the world, which trusts human reason, and never supposes that we can make for ourselves the objects of our worship or the goal of our efforts. The God of Christianity is at once the valor valorum and the ens realissimum. W. R. INGE.