scientific
precision generally. Art and poetry are pursued in the spirit of past
ages, and concern themselves with the symbols, faiths, and ideal
creations of the Past.

It is true, however, that all past ages of the world are
contemporaneous in this age. For example, we have in this nineteenth
century the patriarchal age of the world still surviving in the desert
tents of the Arab,--while the mythic, anthropomorphic period is still
extant in Persia, China, and India, and even among the nations of the
West, in the rustic nooks and corners of the Roman Catholic countries
of Europe. But the existing nations, which still preserve that old
ethnic worship and the mediaeval superstitions, are mere lingerers and
camp-followers in the march of humankind. Under the ample skirts of the
Roman Church still cower and lurk the superstitions of the old ethnic
world, baptized to be sure, and called by new names. The Roman see has
ever had a lingering kindness for the fair humanities of old religion,
which live no longer in the faith of Protestant reason and free
inquiry. She compromised with them of old, and they have clung about
her waist ever since. She has put her uniform upon them, and made them
do service in her cause, and keep alive with their breath the fast
expiring embers of faith and imaginative credulity, which she so much
loves and commends. Like an equivocal and ambiguous nature, the old
Mother Church, as she is called, is upward fair and Christian, but
downward foul and ethnic. She attacks human nature on the side of the
heart, the senses, and those old instincts which Coleridge says bring
back the old names. Reason and intellection, sharpened by science, she
abhors; but so large a part of mankind still linger in the rear of the
vanguard nations, that she has yet a long lease of life to run, with
myriads of adherents to cling to her with fanatical tenacity,--nay,
with proselytes from amongst the poetical, the artistic, and
imaginative, who voluntarily prefer to the broad sunshine of science
the twilight gloom of her sanctuaries, in order there the better to woo
the old inspiration of art, superstitious faith, and poesy. The old
ethnic instincts of human nature are formidable auxiliaries of the
Mother Church. Puseyism would rehallow the saintly wells even of
Protestant, practical England, and send John Bull again on a pilgrimage
to the shrines of Canterbury and Walsingham. Compare a Yankee,
common-school-bred, and an Aust