the rivalry of the
prima donna, and that he was furbishing up the rusty ecclesiastical
enginery to sustain his cause.

[Sidenote: Respective influence of the clergy, the lawyers, and
physicians.] In the day of their power the ecclesiastical profession
were the supporters of this delusion. They found it suitable to their
interests, and, by dint of at first persuading others to believe, they
at last, by habit, came to believe in it themselves. The Mohammedans and
Jews were the first to assail it philosophically and by sarcasm, but its
final ruin was brought about by the action of the two other professions,
the legal and the medical. The lawyers, whose advent to power is seen in
the history of Philip the Fair, and whose rise from that time was very
rapid, were obliged to introduce the true methods of evidence; the
physicians, from their pursuits, were perpetually led to the material
explanation of natural phenomena in contradistinction to the mystical.
It is to the honour of both these professions that they never sought for
a perpetuation of power by schemes of vast organization, never attempted
to delude mankind by stupendous impostures, never compelled them to
desist from the expression of their thoughts, and even from thinking, by
alliances with civil power. Far from being the determined antagonists of
human knowledge, they uniformly fostered it, and, in its trials,
defended it. The lawyers were hated because they replaced supernatural
logic by philosophical logic; the physicians, because they broke down
the profitable but mendacious system of miracle-cures.

[Sidenote: Position of the Church.] Yet the Church is not without
excuse. In all her varied history it was impossible to disentangle her
from the principles which at the beginning had entered into her
political organization. For good or evil, right or wrong, her necessity
required that she should put herself forth as the possessor of all
knowledge within the reach of human intellect--the infallible arbitress
of every question that should arise among men. Doubtless it was a
splendid imposture, capable for a time of yielding great results, but
sooner or later certain to be unmasked. Early discovering the antagonism
of science, which could not fail, in due season, to subject her
pretensions to investigation, she lent herself to a systematic delusion
of the illiterate, and thereby tried to put off that fatal day when
creeds engendered in the darkness would have to be