ondon Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.

Here we have Macaulay in all his strength and all his limitations. The
passage contains in the main a solid truth--a truth which was very
little accepted in England in the year 1840--a truth of vast import and
very needful to assert. And this truth is clothed in such pomp of
illustration, and is hammered into the mind with such accumulated
blows; it is so clear, so hard, so coruscating with images, that it is
impossible to escape its effect. The paragraph is one never to be
forgotten, and not easy to be refuted or qualified. No intelligent
tiro in history can read that page without being set a-thinking,
without feeling that he has a formidable problem to solve. Tens of
thousands of young minds must have had that deeply-coloured picture of
Rome visibly before them in many a Protestant home in England and in
America. Now, all this is a very great merit. To have posed a great
historical problem, at a time when it was very faintly grasped, and to
have sent it ringing across the English-speaking world in such a form
that he who runs may read--nay, he who rides, he who sails, he who
watches sheep or stock _must_ read--this is a real and signal service
conferred on literature and on thought. Compare this solid sense with
Carlyle's ribaldry about "the three-hatted Papa," "pig's wash,"
"servants of the Devil," "this accursed nightmare," and the rest of his
execrations--and we see the difference between the sane judgment of the
man of the world and the prejudices of intolerant fanaticism.

But, unfortunately, Macaulay, having stated in majestic antitheses his
problem of "the unchangeable Church," makes no attempt to provide us
with a solution. This splendid eulogium is not meant to convert us to
Catholicism--very far from it. Macaulay was no Catholic, and had only
a sort of literary admiration for the Papacy. As Mr. Cotter Morison
has shown, he leaves the problem just where he found it, and such
theories as he offers are not quite trustworthy. He does not suggest
that the Catholic Church is permanent because it possesses truth: but,
rather, because men's ideas of truth are a matter of idiosyncrasy or
digestion. The whole essay is not a very safe guide to the history of
Protestantism or of Catholicism, though it is full of brilliant points
and sensible assertions. And in the end our essayist, the rebel from
his Puritan traditions, and the close ally of sceptical Gall