assuming the title of “servant of the servants of God,” yet arrogating the highest seat among worldly dignitaries.  Was there ever such a contradiction?—­“glory in debasement, and debasement in glory,”—­type of the misery and greatness of man?  Was there ever such a mystery, so occult are its arts, so subtile its policy, so plausible its pretensions, so certain its shafts?  How imposing the words of paternal benediction!  How grand the liturgy brought down from ages of faith!  How absorbed with beatific devotion appears to be the worshipper at its consecrated altars!  How ravishing the music and the chants of grand ceremonials!  How typical the churches and consecrated monuments of the passion of Christ!  Everywhere you see the great emblem of our redemption,—­on the loftiest pinnacle of the Mediaeval cathedral, on the dresses of the priests, over the gorgeous altars, in the ceremony of the Mass, in the baptismal rite, in the paintings of the side chapels; everywhere are rites and emblems betokening maceration, grief, sacrifice, penitence, the humiliation of humanity before the awful power of divine Omnipotence, whose personality and moral government no Catholic is tempted to deny.

And yet what crimes and abominations have not been committed in the name of the Church?  If we go back and accept the history of the darker ages, what wars has not this Church encouraged, what discords has she not incited, what superstitions has she not indorsed, what pride has she not arrogated, what cruelties has she not inflicted, what countries has she not robbed, what hardships has she not imposed, what deceptions has she not used, what avenues of thought has she not guarded with a flaming sword, what truth has she not perverted, what goodness has she not mocked and persecuted?  Ah, interrogate the Albigenses, the Waldenses, the shades of Jerome of Prague, of Huss, of Savonarola, of Cranmer, of Coligny, of Galileo; interrogate the martyrs of the Thirty Years’ War, and those who were slain by the dragonnades of Louis XIV., those who fell by the hand of Alva and Charles IX.; go to Smithfield, and Paris on Saint Bartholomew; think of gunpowder plots and inquisitions, and intrigues and tortures, all vigorously carried on under the cloak of Religion—­barbarities worse than those of savages, inflicted at the command of the ministers of a gospel of love!

I am compelled to allude to these things; I do not dwell on them, since they were the result of the intolerance of human nature as much as the bigotry of the Church,—­faults of an age, more than of a religion; although, whether exaggerated or not, more disgraceful than the persecutions of Christians by Roman emperors.