Under the ecclesiastical domination of Rome similar effects occurred.  In the open country the monastery replaced the legionary encampment; in the village or town, the church was a centre of light.  A powerful effect was produced by the elegant luxury of the former, and by the sacred and solemn monitions of the latter.

In extolling the papal system for what it did in the organization of the family, the definition of civil policy, the construction of the states of Europe, our praise must be limited by the recollection that the chief object of ecclesiastical policy was the aggrandizement of the Church, not the promotion of civilization.  The benefit obtained by the laity was not through any special intention, but incidental or collateral.

There was no far-reaching, no persistent plan to ameliorate the physical condition of the nations.  Nothing was done to favor their intellectual development; indeed, on the contrary, it was the settled policy to keep them not merely illiterate, but ignorant.  Century after century passed away, and left the peasantry but little better than the cattle in the fields.  Intercommunication and locomotion, which tend so powerfully to expand the ideas, received no encouragement; the majority of men died without ever having ventured out of the neighborhood in which they were born.  For them there was no hope of personal improvement, none of the bettering of their lot; there were no comprehensive schemes for the avoidance of individual want, none for the resistance of famines.  Pestilences were permitted to stalk forth unchecked, or at best opposed only by mummeries.  Bad food, wretched clothing, inadequate shelter, were suffered to produce their result, and at the end of a thousand years the population of Europe had not doubled.

If policy may be held accountable as much for the births it prevents as for the deaths it occasions, what a great responsibility there is here!

In this investigation of the influence of Catholicism, we must carefully keep separate what it did for the people and what it did for itself.  When we think of the stately monastery, an embodiment of luxury, with its closely-mown lawns, its gardens and bowers, its fountains and many murmuring streams, we must connect it not with the ague-stricken peasant dying without help in the fens, but with the abbot, his ambling palfrey, his hawk and hounds, his well-stocked cellar and larder.  He is part of a system that has its centre of authority in Italy..  To that his allegiance is due.  For its behoof are all his acts.  When we survey, as still we may, the magnificent churches and cathedrals of those times, miracles of architectural skill—­the only real miracles of Catholicism—­when in imagination we restore the transcendently imposing, the noble services of which they were once the scene, the dim, religious-light streaming in through the many-colored windows, the sounds of voices not inferior in their melody to those of heaven, the priests in their sacred vestments, and above all the prostrate worshipers listening to litanies and prayers in a foreign and unknown tongue, shall we not ask ourselves, Was all this for the sake of those worshipers, or for the glory of the great, the overshadowing authority at Rome?