with a solution. This splendid eulogium is not meant to convert us to
Catholicism--very far from it. Macaulay was no Catholic, and had only
a sort of literary admiration for the Papacy. As Mr. Cotter Morison
has shown, he leaves the problem just where he found it, and such
theories as he offers are not quite trustworthy. He does not suggest
that the Catholic Church is permanent because it possesses truth: but,
rather, because men's ideas of truth are a matter of idiosyncrasy or
digestion. The whole essay is not a very safe guide to the history of
Protestantism or of Catholicism, though it is full of brilliant points
and sensible assertions. And in the end our essayist, the rebel from
his Puritan traditions, and the close ally of sceptical Gallios, after
forty pages of learned _pros_ and _cons_, declares that he will not say
more for fear of "exciting angry feelings." He rather sneers at
Protestant fervour: he declaims grand sentences about Catholic fervour.
He will not declare for either of them; and it does not seem to matter
much in the long run for which men declare, provided they can be kept
well in hand by saving common-sense. In the meantime the topic is a
mine of paradox to the picturesque historian. This is not philosophy,
it is not history, but it is full of a certain rich literary seed.

The passage, though a truism to all thoughtful men, was a striking
novelty to English Protestants fifty years ago. But it will hardly
bear a close scrutiny of these sweeping, sharp-edged, "cock-sure"
dogmas of which it is composed. The exact propositions it contains may
be singly accurate; but as to the most enduring "work of human policy,"
it is fair to remember that the Civil Law of Rome has a continuous
history of at least twenty-four centuries; that the Roman Empire from
Augustus to the last Constantine in New Rome endured for fifteen
centuries; and from Augustus to the last Hapsburg it endured for
eighteen centuries. There is a certain ambiguity between the way in