the literature of the ancient world. We believe that, on the face of it, that is true. Of course it is idle to speculate as to how much of the literature of the past might have come down in some other way; but, as a matter of fact, that Homer and Virgil still sing to us, that we can commune with the inner life of Cicero, that we have his speculations on this world. and the next, that we have the history of Thucydides and the writings of Sallust, that we have all the great body of classical literature, is due to the work of the monks in their seclusion, as they wrote and copied those things which they were interested in, and so brought them down for the use of the modern world.

There is one other point that has always won my admiration, as I have studied the history of the Church in the past; and that is that during the Middle Ages it stood for the democratic idea, for the rights of man against the passionate irresponsibility and brutal power of the fighting nobles, who in their jealousies of each other ignored every right, human and divine. Think, for a moment, in a world where birth and blood were supreme, and the lives of the masses of the people were entirely unregarded, here stood this one grand object lesson of the Church, whose Prince, the very representative of God on earth and mightier than all barons, at whose feet kings and emperors must kneel, this man might be the poorest peasant. No blood required, no title, the child of the peasant, by force of character and ability, might win his way until kings were glad to hold his stirrup as he mounted his horse. This assertion of the divinity of simple manhood was something for which we owe a large debt to the Church in those far-off years. And then, time and time again, the Church stood in defence of human rights. The altar of the church was always a refuge. In any part of the empire, in any part of Christendom, a man might appeal from any earthly power to what he believed to be the divine justice as represented by the Pope of Rome, so that during those rough, hard, brutal days the Church did stand for so much of democracy, so much of humanity, so much of liberty, as to make itself an admitted power.

And now it is time to turn to the less pleasing side of the picture, the shadows that we find over this magnificent Church of the past. I suppose it was absolutely essential at the first, in order that the Church might gain its supremacy, that it should claim to be infallible, to be the very voice of God. But do you not see the difficulties in which this very claim would plunge the Church as the ages went by? The Church pronounces her opinion on astronomy, for instance, on the nature of the earth and the heavens, on the origin of the earth and of man, and all these great questions that we speak of under the term "science" to day. About these the Church had uttered her conviction, which she declared to be the divine and infallible truth of God. Do you not see, then, that here was a childish period of growth of human knowledge, a childish conception of things declared to be God's infallible truth? Inevitably, then, as the world grew, as men learned more about the earth and heavens and man, inevitably knowledge must break the claim of the Church. The world must either stop growing or the Church must be outgrown. What then? Why, the Church had committed itself to this theory, committed itself so that there was no hiding it, no taking it back. What then? Why, it must inevitably become the enemy of the growth of human knowledge. It must either stop the world's growth or confess that it had been wrong. There was no alternative. The Church could not deny her past claim. She had committed herself to this theory. The result was that there has hardly been a single advance in human knowledge that the Church has not anathematized and refused, as far and as fast as it could, to admit. The pathetic figure of Kepler, after he had discovered the laws of planetary motion, not daring to publish his book until the eve of his death; Galileo persecuted because, forsooth, he had discovered the moons of Jupiter, which he did not create, and which he was not responsible for; Bruno, imprisoned for years, and then burned in Rome for daring to have opinions concerning God and men which the priests had not discovered before his birth; and a thou

sand other illustrations,- will occur to you, as showing the fact that the Church had committed itself to these old theories, and could not accept any new advance. So it was perfectly logical for Pius IX. to issue a bull, in which he denounced all modern knowledge and all modern speculation as godless,-godless from his point, because opposed to the Church.

Then the next logical step, the Church believing that it represented divine truth, and feeling that these things were works of the devil, was that it must prevent them. How? Persuasion not being sufficient, it must resort to force; and so we find the Church turned into the most pitiless, cruel, persecuting power that this world has ever seen. There has never been in any age, in any nation, under any religion, anything approaching the bloody, cruel, age-long persecutions of the Church of Rome. The persecutions which the early Christians received from the Roman Empire, having political motives back of them, were as nothing compared with the streams of blood and tears for which the Church of Rome is responsible. But the Church was fighting for what she believed to be God's truth. And since, according to her doctrines, the eternal welfare of man depended on continued belief in these doctrines, of what importance were the lives, the brief lives, of the few thousands or hundreds of thousands of men and women, when weighed in the balance against eternal felicity or eternal woe? The Church, then, has been the great persecutor of free thought.

The next step, logically and inevitably, has been that the Church, having been at one time the representative of human rights, has found herself in the position of the mightiest foe of human freedom that the world has ever known. Not able by her own power to execute her decrees and maintain her supremacy, she has called to herself the aid of the civil arm, nobles, kings, and tyrants, all those who wished to maintain the old régime, and prevent this modern uprising of the ideals of freedom and human rights. The Church has never recognized any rights simply as human. She has only recog

nized the right of man to hear and obey her voice. She could no other, and maintain her claims to supremacy. She has been, then, in all the modern world the ally of every anti-human tyranny that has been known. She has endeavored to maintain her supremacy against the rise of humanity, the demand for liberty of thought and action.

It is sometimes said that we owe a great deal to the Roman Church, and ought not to wish to weaken its power over the masses of the people, the ignorant, the brutal, the half-civilized dregs of the population of Europe and America. I have heard a great many liberals say that they rejoiced in the supremacy of the Roman Church, because it is capable of keeping the brutal and ignorant masses in some order. There is an element of truth in this. Let us turn it over a moment, and look at the sweeter side of it. Take the day laborer who is hardly able to read or write; take the servants in our kitchens, whose lives are one long scene of commonplace toil,- to them the Church is their literature, the Church is their art, their romance, their ideal, their dream, their poetry, their hope of the destiny that by and by shall redeem all the sordidness and poverty of this present career. I would not take this away from them, except in the process I could substitute something that should equally satisfy and uplift. Neither would I take away from the rougher elements of society that hard iron hand that holds them in some order, except, again, by the process I could substitute something else equally effective. And I should have no special objection to the Roman Church playing this part of the primary school, provided it would recognize its rôle as primary school. There is the one defect. The primary school is intended for primary scholars. There is no use of talking to them of art and literature. But the primary school recognizes its office as primary school, and undertakes to fit its children to outgrow itself and go on to something better. The one defect of the Roman Church is that, while it might play this part of primary school, and play it successfully, it ignores and denies the right of any higher

grade to exist. It tries to keep its pupils in the primary school forever, and forbids them to learn anything beyond its own limits, and, if it could have its way, would prevent every step of human advance that we are likely to take in the next few centuries, as it has objected to every step that has been taken in the last five hundred years.

Where are we, then, to-day, as related to this Roman Church? In the first place, I cannot, as I study history, share the fears of a great many excited and irritated Protestants of this nineteenth century. As I look back one or two hundred years, and see the whole of Europe in the grasp of the Roman Church, and as I look there now and see the Church weaker than it has ever been in its entire history, I cannot be afraid of its power in the future; for every force and tendency of civilization at the present time is anti-Roman. Why, what did they do in Italy but a short time ago? In the face of the Vatican itself, the people set up a statue of Bruno, celebrating that which he was burned for three hundred years ago. And only this last week the King of Italy, a Catholic, too, asserted his absolute supremacy over his own empire, and warned the Church to attend to its own affairs and keep its own place. This from a Catholic sovereign in Italy! In Italy to-day education is taken out of the hands of the priesthood and put into the hands of the people, the government. There is not a kingdom to-day in Europe, except Spain, where the Catholic Church retains more than a vestige of her oldtime power. She is weakening, weakening year by year. But, say these irritated Protestants, she is growing enormously in this country. You do not add to the number of the Catholics in the world by immigration, by taking them from one place and putting them in another. It does not double their numbers; and in the free air of America the process of transforming the Roman Church is such that it has not at all the power that it had in the past. There are hundreds and thousands of loyal Roman Catholics in America who will submit to the Church in matters touching relig ion, but who resent her interference with their political or