to an elimination of that authority
as an active element in the approaching European system. [Sidenote: The
excuses of ecclesiasticism.] To such the Church might emphatically
address herself, pointing out the signal and brilliant results to which
she had given rise, and displaying the manifest evils which must
inevitably ensue if her relations, as then existing, should be touched.
For it must have been plain that the first effect arising from the
coalition of the intellectual with the moral element would be an
assertion of the right of private judgment in the individual--a
condition utterly inconsistent with the dominating influence of
authority. It was actually upon that very principle that the battle of
the Reformation was eventually fought. She might point out--for it
needed no prophetic inspiration--that, if once this principle was
yielded, there could be no other issue in Christendom than a total
decomposition; that though, for a little while, the separation might be
limited to a few great confessions, these, under the very influence of
the principle that had brought themselves into existence, must, in their
turn, undergo disintegration, and the end of it be a complete anarchy of
sects. [Sidenote: Her feeble resistance.] In one sense it may be said
that it was in wisdom that the Church took her stand upon this point,
determining to make it her base of resistance; unwisely in another, for
it was evident that she had already lost the initiative of action, and
that her very resistance would constitute the first stage in the process
of decomposition.

[Sidenote: Contemporaneous changes in Europe.] Europe had made a vast
step during its Age of Faith. Spontaneously it had grown through its
youth; and the Italians, who had furnished it with many of its ideas,
had furnished it also with many of its forms of life. In that respect
justice has still to be done them. When Rome broke away from her
connexions with Constantinople, a cloud of more than Cimmerian darkness
overshadowed Europe. It was occupied by wandering savages. Six hundred
years organized it into families, neighbourhoods, cities. Those
centuries found it full of bondmen; they left it without a slave. They
found it a scene of violence, rapine, lust; they left it the abode of
God-fearing men. Where there had been trackless forests, there were
innumerable steeples glittering in the sun; where there had been bloody
chieftains, drinking out of their enemies' skulls, t