forms. Art revived, and began to paint the beautiful faces of beautiful women. It even smuggled them into ecclesiastical paintings under the names of saints or madonnas or Magdalenes; but, whatever name they gave them, there came this great change on the part of the art of the world, the essential condition of which was the recognition of the real form and the real beauty of this present living world.

All the other departments and interests of human life shared in this revival. Men dared to think that life here under the blue sky was a fair thing; and they began to have an interest in the forces and facts of this real world out of which modern science has been born.

You will see very readily how this great interest in this world began to weaken the hold which the Church had on the masses of the people. As they learned to think of and love this world, they began to revolt against that which they suspected might be a hideous misrepresentation of the other world. For, if God had made this one so fair and beautiful, by what process was God so transformed that in other regions he made only that which was ghostly, ghastly, horrible, and unreal? This, you will note, was a great change in the tone, the temper, the method of civilization,- a change that could not but transform religion itself among other things.

In the second place, there grew up a revolt of the conscience of Europe against the tyranny, the cruelties, the palpable, observed immoralities of the Church. There was a long history here, reaching back for a hundred or two years. I only need call to your mind the fact of such writings as those of Rabelais, in which, disguised though they were, he shoots his arrows of ridicule and contemptuous laughter at the abusers of Christendom. I need only call your attention to such a book as "Reynard the Fox." So there grew up a popular literature in which the begging friars, the paupers, the parasites, that represented the Church, were treated with contempt, were stripped of their disguises and recognized as just what they were. The conscience of the world was beginning to dare to ask the question whether that which was

right in heaven could be so horribly wrong here. And, as the Church represented these abuses in so flagrant a manner that they could not be hidden, the consciences of the people began to wonder whether the pretensions of the Church in claiming to represent and speak for the justice of the Almighty God might not, after all, be unfounded. When popes and cardinals, in spite of all their vows, recognized and advanced to the highest positions and in the most shameless manner their own children, and when indulgences and the privilege of committing sins were sold broadcast over Europe, when the Church allied itself with all the forces of tyranny and oppression, when it represented every form of injustice and human indignity, no wonder that the conscience of the world began to assert itself and appeal even from the god on earth sitting in Rome to the real God that he misrepresented.

Then, in the third place, another cause began to be mightily operative, the growth of individualism. It is very difficult for us in the modern world to comprehend just how much and just what this meant. It seems to us strange, at first blush, as we observe the characteristics and conduct of the Indians in the far West, to find them, because they have been wronged, because some member of their tribe has been killed, straightway proceeding to wrong and rob and kill the first white man that they come across, without any regard to the fact as to whether he is guilty or not. But this represents only that lower stage of culture on which the whole world once stood. You may read in the Old Testament how David disobeys God's express command; and what does God do,- punish David? No, he kills sixty or seventy thousand Israelites. There was this sense of corporate responsibility, not individual responsibility. You will see how inevitable this is at a certain stage of culture. What is the wild Indian to do? He has no means of finding the guilty party, and can only strike out blindly, hoping that his indiscriminate revenge will in some way prevent such things in the future. Go back to the period of devel

opment, when men were generally in this tribal condition, and do you not see that there was nothing else open for them to do? So the vendetta in Corsica and in some other parts of the world to-day is nothing more nor less than a survival of that old rude attempt at justice. When certain Jews in Spain offended the monarch of Spain, the cry arose that God would punish Spain because the Jews with their heresies were permitted to live there. What did the authorities do? They did not seek out the particular Jews who had been the cause of that feeling; but the cry arose that the Jews must all be expelled. Do you not see that God was supposed to punish all Spain for what some Jews had done? And the only way that they could ward off God's vengeance was to expel all the Jewish people. I speak of these things to illustrate to you to what an extent that sense of corporate responsibility prevailed in the ancient world. But at last there began to dawn a sense of individual responsibility.

I had that point in mind in reading my lesson from Ezekiel this morning. There is the first contradiction of the corporate idea in the whole Bible. Ezekiel says there is to be a change hereafter. The soul that sinneth, it is to be punished; and the particular man that does right, he is to be rewarded, not his whole family or his whole people, as it had been aforetime.

So there was growing in Europe the sense of this individual responsibility; and that meant what? It meant rebellion against the corporate, wholesale domination of the Church. Carried out, do you not see that it meant church disintegration?

One other cause, and that was the discovery of the Bible. That is generally spoken of as though it were all it is only one of these four, and of importance only in this sense. The Church had claimed to speak of divine right; but there had dawned upon the thought of intelligent people, at any rate, the remembrance that there was such a thing as a Bible which claimed to be a revelation, that the Church pretended to speak by virtue of authority conferred on it by

this revelation. But, when they discovered the Bible, and read it for themselves, they found that the Church had built up on the basis of this claimed revelation an authority that the Bible did not warrant; and so it was an appeal through this perversion of God's revelation, as they called it, to the revelation itself, this new authority older than the Church, by which the Church's perversion might be met and subverted. These four causes culminated in the Protestant revolution.

II. Without dwelling on that at any further length, I must turn to the next division of my theme. I wish to point out to you some few particulars in which Protestantism was not a marked advance, if any advance at all, on the old Romish Church.

In the first place, to my mind, the basis of authority of Protestantism is not so rational as is the claim that authority is based upon the Church. What does the Church claim? It claims that the Church, as such, is an organization inhabited by, pervaded by, the living spirit of the living God. What is the claim for the Bible? That it is a book written by the inspiration of God, and completed a couple of thousand years ago. Even though it were such at the beginning, there could be no certainty to us that it had been transferred in its purity. Then it would seem to place God at least two thousand years away from us,- he has not said anything to the world for two thousand years. But, on the basis of the Catholic claim, God is alive, and in vital contact with his world every day and every hour. He may speak this morning with as much authority as he spoke two thousand years ago. To my mind, the supposition that the book is the basis of doctrinal authority in place of the living Church is not an advance. It seems to me even less rational and less provable than the other.

Another point. The Protestant Church, within the limits. of its power, could persecute as bitterly as that of Rome. I presume that the reason why there is not a longer story of Protestant persecution is that the modern world and the

spirit of liberty have transformed and changed the conditions of human life, and that persecution is not possible or is not found to be expedient. Torquemada, who founded the Inquisition, was of the same spirit as Calvin; and, if they could have changed places, Calvin might have made another Torquemada. Calvin could burn his opponent the first moment that he had the power. He could inveigle him into his toils by treachery, in order that he might burn him.

Then, after Protestantism took the place of Romanism, was the Church of England kindly towards Dissenters? Under Archbishop Laud it crushed out every form of dissent, just so far as its power extended; and it carried on this bitter persecution in the Highlands of Scotland and against the Covenanters, so long as it had the power. Protestantism, then, of the older type has been as bitter a persecutor within the limits of its power as was Rome.

Protestantism has tried with all the means and forces it possessed to stay the progress of human thought. It has tried as hard as Rome has tried. It simply stood by the Bible against the pope,- that is all. As Milton said with bitter irony, even in his time, "new Presbyter is but old pope writ large." The Protestant Church has opposed itself to modern science, has opposed every step of growth that it has supposed to be inconsistent with its interpretation of the Bible, as persistently as has Rome. Rome has simply made the teachings of the Church her standard of doctrine, and has fought everything that conflicted with that. Protestantism has made its interpretation of the Bible the standard of authority, and has fought everything that it regarded as inconsistent with that. That is all the difference. No: there is another difference. In the old days the pope had more power to persecute and kill than Protestantism ever had. But Protestantism has done as well as it could under the circumstances.

How was it here in New England under the Puritans? When they fled from persecution in the Old World and established themselves in this, they assumed that they repre