direct path to ruin; a world so wicked as the liberal world against
which St. John the Baptist thundered was necessarily on the verge of
destruction. Sin, although we moderns may not think so, seemed to the
ancient Jews a fearful imprudence. The hand of the Lord would descend
on it heavily, and very soon. The whole Roman civilisation was to be
overthrown in the twinkling of an eye. Those who hoped to be of the
remnant and to be saved, so as to lead a clarified and heavenly life
in the New Jerusalem, must hasten to put on sackcloth and ashes, to
fast and to pray, to watch with girded loins for the coming of the
kingdom; it was superfluous for them to study the dead past or to take
thought for the morrow. The cataclysm was at hand; a new heaven and a
new earth--far more worthy of study--would be unrolled before that
very generation.

There was indeed something terribly levelling, revolutionary, serious,
and expectant about that primitive gospel; and in so far as liberalism
possessed similar qualities, in so far as it was moved by indignation,
pity, and fervent hope, it could well preach on early Christian texts.
But the liberal Catholics were liberals of the polite and
governmental sort; they were shocked at suffering rather than at sin,
and they feared not the Lord but the movement of public opinion. Some
of them were vaguely pious men, whose conservativism in social and
moral matters forbade them to acquiesce in the disappearance of the
church altogether, and they thought it might be preserved, as the
English church is, by making opportune concessions. Others were simply
aristocrats, desirous that the pacifying influence of religion should
remain strong over the masses. The clergy was not, in any considerable
measure, tossed by these opposing currents; the few priests who were
liberals were themselves men of the world, patriots, and orators. Such
persons could not look forward to a fierce sifting of the wheat from