stent 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
ide