insensible process I passed into the habit of examining opinions
mainly from an historical point of view--investigating the
circumstances under which they grow up; their relation to the general
conditions of their time; the direction in which they naturally
develop; the part, whether for good or ill, which during long spaces
of time they have played in the world. It was first of all in
connection with the Roman Catholic controversy, with which we were
much occupied in Ireland, that I learnt to pursue this course. Of the
enormous and essential difference between matured Catholicism and the
Christianity of the New Testament, I never doubted, and my convictions
were much deepened by long travels in Italy, France, and Spain, during
which I endeavoured to study carefully Catholicism in its actual
workings as a popular religion, and not as it appears clarified and
rationalised in such books as the 'Exposition,' by Bossuet. I often
asked myself, who could have imagined from a perusal of the New
Testament that Christianity was intended to be a highly centralised
monarchy, governed with supreme divine authority by the Bishop of
Rome; that this bishop was to be connected, not with the great author
of the Epistle to the Romans, but with St. Peter; that the figure
which was to occupy the most prominent place in the devotions and
imaginations of millions of Christian worshippers was to be the Virgin
Mary, who is not so much as mentioned in the Epistles; that in the
immediate neighbourhood, and with the full sanction of the highest
ecclesiastical authorities, graven images were to be employed in
devotion as conspicuously as in a pagan temple, particular images
being singled out from all others for particular devotion by special
indulgences and by special miracles? I soon convinced myself that
popular Catholicism, as it exists in southern Europe and as it has
existed through a long course of centuries, is as literally
polytheistic and idolatrous as any form of paganism, though it has
many beauties, and though much of its very mingled influence has been
for good. In the teaching of my early youth, this transformation of
Christianity was described as the great predicted apostasy, the
mystery of iniquity, the work of Antichrist among mankind. Under the
influence of the historic method it assumed a different aspect, and
the mystery became very explicable. Hobbes had struck the keynote in a
passage of profound truth as well as of admirable