Is not that a strange logic which finds proof of an asserted fact in an inexplicable illustration of something else?

Even in the darkest ages intelligent Christian men must have had misgivings as to these alleged providential or miraculous interventions. There is a solemn grandeur in the orderly progress of Nature which profoundly impresses us; and such is the character of continuity in the events of our individual life that we instinctively doubt the occurrence of the supernatural in that of our neighbor. The intelligent man knows well that, for his personal behoof, the course of Nature has never been checked; for him no miracle has ever been worked; he attributes justly every event of his life to some antecedent event; this he looks upon as the cause, that as the consequence. When it is affirmed that, in his neighbor's behalf, such grand interventions have been vouchsafed, he cannot do otherwise than believe that his neighbor is either deceived, or practising deception.

As might, then, have been anticipated, the Catholic doctrine of miraculous intervention received a rude shock at the time of the Reformation, when predestination and election were upheld by some of the greatest theologians, and accepted by some of the greatest Protestant Churches. With stoical austerity Calvin declares: "We were elected from eternity, before the foundation of the world, from no merit of our own, but according to the purpose of the divine pleasure." In affirming this, Calvin was resting on the belief that God has from all eternity decreed whatever comes to pass. Thus, after the lapse of many ages, were again emerging into prominence the ideas of the Basilidians and Valentinians, Christian sects of the second century, whose Gnostical views led to the engraftment of the great

doctrine of the Trinity upon Christianity. They asserted that all the actions of men are necessary, that even faith is a natural gift, to which men are forcibly determined, and must therefore be saved, though their lives be ever so irregular. From the Supreme God all things proceeded. Thus, also, came into prominence the views which were developed by Augustine in his work, "De dono perseverantiæ." These were: that God, by his arbitrary will, has selected certain persons without respect to foreseen faith or good works, and has infallibly ordained to bestow upon them eternal happiness; other persons, in like manner, he has condemned to eternal reprobation. The Sublapsarians believed that "God permitted the fall of Adam;" the Supralapsarians that "he predestinated it, with all its pernicious consequences, from all eternity, and that our first parents had no liberty from the beginning." In this, these sectarians disregarded the remark of St. Augustine: "Nefas est dicere Deum aliquid nisi bonum predesti

nare."

Is it true, then, that "predestination to eternal happiness is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby, before the foundations of the world were laid, he hath constantly decreed by his council, secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen out of mankind?" Is it true that of the human family there are some who, in view of no fault of their own, Almighty God has condemned to unending torture, eternal misery?

In 1595 the Lambeth Articles asserted that "God from eternity hath predestinated certain men unto life; certain he hath reprobated." In 1618 the Synod of Dort decided in favor of this view. It condemned the remonstrants against it, and treated them with such se

verity, that many of them had to flee to foreign coun tries. Even in the Church of England, as is manifested by its seventeenth Article of Faith, these doctrines have found favor.

Probably there was no point which brought down from the Catholics on the Protestants severer condemnation than this, their partial acceptance of the government of the world by law. In all Reformed Europe miracles ceased. But, with the cessation of shrine-cure, relic-cure, great pecuniary profits ended. Indeed, as is well known, it was the sale of indulgences that provoked the Reformation-indulgences which are essentially a permit from God for the practice of sin, conditioned on the payment of a certain sum of money to the priest.

Philosophically, the Reformation implied a protest against the Catholic doctrine of incessant divine intervention in human affairs, invoked by sacerdotal agency; but this protest was far from being fully made by all the Reforming Churches. The evidence in behalf of government by law, which has of late years been offered by science, is received by many of them with suspicion, perhaps with dislike; sentiments which, however, must eventually give way before the hourly-increasing weight of evidence.

Shall we not, then, conclude with Cicero, who, quoted by Lactantius, says: "One eternal and immutable law embraces all things and all times?”

CHAPTER X.

LATIN CHRISTIANITY IN RELATION TO MODERN CIVILI

ZATION.

For more than a thousand years Latin Christianity controlled the intelligence of Europe, and is responsible for the result.

That result is manifested by the condition of the city of Rome at the Reformation, and by the condition of the Continent of Europe in domestic and social life.—European nations suffered under the coexistence of a dual government, a spiritual and a temporal.—They were immersed in ignorance, superstition, discomfort.-Explanation of the failure of Catholicism.-Political history of the papacy: it was transmuted from a spiritual confederacy into an absolute monarchy. -Action of the College of Cardinals and the Curia.-Demoralization that ensued from the necessity of raising large revenues.

The advantages accruing to Europe during the Catholic rule arose not from direct intention, but were incidental.

The general result is, that the political influence of Catholicism was prejudicial to modern civilization.

LATIN Christianity is responsible for the condition and progress of Europe from the fourth to the sixteenth century. We have now to examine how it discharged its trust.

It will be convenient to limit to the case of Europe what has here to be presented, though, from the claim of the papacy to superhuman origin, and its demand for universal obedience, it should strictly be held to account for the condition of all mankind. Its inefficacy against the great and venerable religions of Southern and East

ern Asia would furnish an important and instructive. theme for consideration, and lead us to the conclusion that it has impressed itself only where Roman imperial influences have prevailed; a political conclusion which, however, it contemptuously rejects.

Doubtless at the inception of the Reformation there were many persons who compared the existing social condition with what it had been in ancient times. Mor als had not changed, intelligence had not advanced, society had little improved. From the Eternal City itself its splendors had vanished. The marble streets, of which Augustus had once boasted, had disappeared. Temples, broken columns, and the long, arcaded vistas of gigantic aqueducts bestriding the desolate Campagna, presented a mournful scene. From the uses to which they had been respectively put, the Capitol had been known as Goats' Hill, and the site of the Roman Forum, whence laws had been issued to the world, as Cows' Field. The palace of the Cæsars was hidden by mounds of earth, crested with flowering shrubs. The baths of Caracalla, with their porticoes, gardens, reservoirs, had long ago become useless through the destruction of their supplying aqueducts. On the ruins of that grand edifice, "flowery glades and thickets of odoriferous trees extended in ever-winding labyrinths upon immense platforms, and dizzy arches suspended in the air." Of the Coliseum, the most colossal of Roman ruins, only about one-third remained. Once capable of accommodating nearly ninety thousand spectators, it had, in succession, been turned into a fortress in the middle ages, and then into a stone-quarry to furnish material for the palaces of degenerate Roman princes. Some of the popes had occupied it as a woollen-mill, some as a saltpetrefactory; some had planned the conversion of its mag