Now a statement like that put to the member of a race as short as you like, put to an intelligent dwarf, _ought_ to rouse him to immediate contradiction: however flattering he might find it. So it ought to rouse a man of average stature to even stronger contradiction, and still more, I suppose, a tall man. But it is contradicted, not because the contradictor favours tall men as against short men, but because the statement is in itself false and ridiculous. Sometimes short races have conquered tall ones, as the Romans the Germans, or the Normans the Saxons, or the Japanese the Koreans. Sometimes it has been notoriously the other way about. The putting forward, then, of a statement (1) as universal (when as a fact it is just the opposite), (2) as absurdly simple so that it can be easily swallowed (when as a fact the situation being human is exceedingly complex), (3) with a motive which is not acknowledged, is a thoroughly unscientific way of going to work; yet that is what we Catholics are perpetually finding in the attacks made directly and indirectly against Catholic truths by popular writers on what these writers believe to be “Science” or “History.” So it is with Priesthood. You can cite cases of Priesthood revered in a very simple state of society and cases of a Priesthood dispossessed of power by an advancing lay organization. But so also can you find ample examples of the opposite: Priesthood powerful in a very high civilization and Priesthood overcoming lay power. How a Priesthood arose we do not know: presumably after the same fashion as all other functions of religion. These functions being awful and sacred, there would, in the nature of things, be a special class of men attached to them. But, anyhow, the relations between the idea of a Priest and the idea of Civil Government are most emphatically _not_ the relations between earlier and baser social functions on the one hand, and more developed and higher social functions on the other. You can cite cases where the power of a Priesthood (or, rather, of religion, for it is never the Priest who imposes his religion, but always the religion that needs the Priest) was mastered by the civil power; but you can also cite cases where the exact opposite took place; and you can cite intermediary cases innumerable.