s such as to
enable them to become aware of its corruptions, and whom their interest
or their simplicity did not bribe or beguile into silence, gradually
separated themselves into two vast multitudes of adverse energy, one
tending to Reformation, and the other to Infidelity.

Sec. XCIV. Of these, the last stood, as it were, apart, to watch the
course of the struggle between Romanism and Protestantism; a struggle
which, however necessary, was attended with infinite calamity to the
Church. For, in the first place, the Protestant movement was, in reality,
not _reformation_ but _reanimation_. It poured new life into the Church,
but it did not form or define her anew. In some sort it rather broke down
her hedges, so that all they who passed by might pluck off her grapes.
The reformers speedily found that the enemy was never far behind the
sower of good seed; that an evil spirit might enter the ranks of
reformation as well as those of resistance; and that though the deadly
blight might be checked amidst the wheat, there was no hope of ever
ridding the wheat itself from the tares. New temptations were invented
by Satan wherewith to oppose the revived strength of Christianity: as
the Romanist, confiding in his human teachers, had ceased to try whether
they were teachers sent from God, so the Protestant, confiding in the
teaching of the Spirit, believed every spirit, and did not try the
spirits whether they were of God. And a thousand enthusiasms and
heresies speedily obscured the faith and divided the force of the
Reformation.

Sec. XCV. But the main evils rose out of the antagonism of the two great
parties; primarily, in the mere fact of the existence of an antagonism.
To the eyes of the unbeliever the Church of Christ, for the first time
since its foundation, bore the aspect of a house divided against itself.
Not that many forms of schism had not before arisen in it; but either
they had been obscure and silent, hidden among the shadows of the Alps
and the marshes of the Rhine; or they had been outbreaks of visible and
unmistakable error, cast off by the Church, rootless, and speedily
withering away, while, with much that was erring and criminal, she still
retained within her the pillar and ground of the truth. But here was at
last a schism in which truth and authority were at issue. The body that
was cast off withered away no longer. It stretched out its boughs to the
sea and its branches to the river, and it was the ancient