successfully, to humanise the relations of communities. It satisfied or
stimulated the affections by its exaltation of the Virgin Mary as a
supreme object of worship; it nourished the imagination on polytheistic
legends of saints and martyrs; it stirred the religious emotions by
touching and impressive rites; it surrounded its members with emblems of
a special and invincible protection. Catholicism, we have again and
again to repeat, claimed to deal with life as a whole, and to leave no
province of nature, no faculty of man, no need of intelligence or
spirit, uncomprehended. But we must not forget that, though this
prodigious system had its root in the affections and sympathies of human
nature, it was also fenced round by a theory of metaphysic. It rested
upon authority and tradition, but it also sought an expression in an
intellectual philosophy of things. The essence of this philosophy was to
make man the final cause of the universe. Its interpretation of the
world was absolute; its conception of the Creator was absolute; its
account of our intellectual impressions, of our moral rules, of our
spiritual ideals, made them all absolute. Now Diderot, when he wrote the
Letter on the Blind, perceived that mere rationalistic attacks upon the
sacred books, upon the miracles, upon the moral types, of Catholicism,
could only be partially effective for destruction, and could have no
effect at all in replacing the old ways of thinking by others of more
solid truth. The attack must begin in philosophy. The first fruitful
process must consist in shifting the point of view, in enlarging the
range of the facts to be considered, in pressing the relativity of our
ideas, in freeing ourselves from the tyranny of anthropomorphism.

Hobbes's witty definition of the papacy as the ghost of the old Roman
Empire sitting enthroned on the grave thereof, may tempt us to forget
the all-important truth that the basis of the power of the ghost was
essentially different from that of the dissolved body. The Empire was a