But the Church’s primary doctrine is her own perpetual infallibility.  She is inspired, she declares, by the same Spirit that inspired the Bible; and her voice is, equally with the Bible, the voice of God.  This theory, however, upon which really her whole fabric rests, popular Protestantism either ignores altogether, or treats it as if it were a modern superstition, which, so far from being essential to the Church’s system, is, on the contrary, inconsistent with it.  Looked at in this way, Rome to the Protestant’s mind has seemed naturally to be a mass of superstitions and dishonesties; and it is this view of her that, strangely enough, our modern advanced thinkers have accepted without question.  Though they have trusted the Protestants in nothing else, they have trusted them here.  They have taken the Protestants’ word for it, that Protestantism is more reasonable than Romanism; and they think, therefore, that if they have destroyed the former, a fortiori have they destroyed the latter.[41]

No conception of the matter, however, could be more false than this.  To whatever criticism the Catholic position may be open, it is certainly not thus included in Protestantism, nor is it reached through it.  Let us try and consider the matter a little more truly.  Let us grant all that hostile criticism can say against Protestantism as a supernatural religion:  in other words, let us set it aside altogether.  Let us suppose nothing, to start with, in the world but a natural moral sense, and a simple natural theism; and let us then see the relation of the Church of Rome to that.  Approached in this way, the religious world will appear to us as a body of natural theists, all agreeing that they must do God’s will, but differing widely amongst themselves as to what His will and His nature are.  Their moral and religious views will be equally vague and dreamlike—­more dreamlike even than those of the Protestant world at present.  Their theories as to the future will be but ’shadowy hopes and fears.’  Their practice, in the present, will vary from asceticism to the widest license.  And yet, in spite of all this confusion and difference, there will be amongst them a vague tendency to unanimity.  Each man will be dreaming his own spiritual dream, and the dreams of all will be different.  All their dreams, it will be plain, cannot represent reality; and yet the belief will be common to all that some common reality is represented by them.  Men, therefore, will begin to compare their dreams together, and try to draw out of them the common element, so that the dream may come slowly to be the same for all; that, if it grows, it may grow by some recognizable laws; that it may, in other words, lose its character of a dream, and assume that of a reality.  We suppose, therefore, that our natural theists form themselves into a kind of parliament, in which they may compare, adjust, and give shape to the ideas that were before so wavering, and which shall contain some machinery for formulating such agreements as may be come to.  The common religious sense of the world is thus organized, and its conclusions registered.  We have no longer the wavering dreams of men; we have instead of them the constant vision of man.