s,
but which has as little vital connection with the individual soul as the
dead whelk's shell with the living Hermit. Salvation is a relation at
once vital, personal, and spiritual. This is mechanical and purely
external. And this is of course the final secret of its marvelous
success and world-wide power. A cheap religion is the desideratum of the
human heart; and an assurance of salvation at the smallest possible cost
forms the tempting bait held out to a conscience-stricken world by the
Romish Church. Thousands, therefore, who have never been taught to use
their faculties in "working out their own salvation," thousands who will
not exercise themselves religiously, and who yet cannot be without the
exercise of religion, intrust themselves in idle faith to that venerable
house of refuge which for centuries has stood between God and man. A
Church which has harbored generations of the elect, whose archives
enshrine the names of saints whose foundations are consecrated with
martyrs' blood--shall it not afford a sure asylum still for any soul
which would make its peace with God? So, as the Hermit into the
molluscan shell, creeps the poor soul within the pale of Rome, seeking,
like Adam in the garden, to hide its nakedness from God.

Why does the true lover of men restrain not his lips in warning his
fellows against this and all other priestly religions? It is not because
he fails to see the prodigious energy of the Papal See, or to appreciate
the many noble types of Christian manhood nurtured within its pale. Nor
is it because its teachers are often corrupt and its system of doctrine
inadequate as a representation of the Truth--charges which have to be
made more or less against all religions. But it is because it ministers
falsely to the deepest need of man, reduces the end of religion to
selfishness, and offers safety without spirituality. That these,
theoretically, are its pretensions, we do not affirm; but that its
practical working is to induce in man, and in its worst forms, the
parasitic habit, is testified by results. No one who has studied the
religion of the Continent upon the spot, has failed to be impressed with
the appalling spectacle of tens of thousands of unregenerated men
sheltering themselves, as they conceive it for Eternity, behind the
Sacraments of Rome.

There is no stronger evidence of the inborn parasitic tendency in man in
things religious than the absolute complacency with which even cultured
me