But the clearest illustration of the truth thus insisted on is to be found, not amongst the varying and conflicting doctrines of Protestantism, which represent theoretically the direct result of the revealed truths of the Bible on each believer individually, but in Christianity as represented by the Church of Rome. According to ordinary Protestant opinion, {227} the doctrines of the Church of Rome represent a structure built up by the misguided ingenuity of priests, and imposed by them on a credulous and passive laity; but so far, at all events, as the more important doctrines are concerned, the very reverse is the case really. It has been the world of ordinary believers that has imposed its beliefs on the priests; not the priests that have imposed them on the world of ordinary believers. Let us take, for instance, the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, or the beliefs implied in the _cultus_ of the Virgin Mary. That the sacramental elements were actually the body and blood of Christ, that the Redeemer who died on the cross for each individual sinner entered under the form of these elements into each sinner’s body—entered bearing the stripes on it by which the sinner was healed, and mixing with the sinner’s blood the divine blood that had been shed for him—this was the belief of the common unlettered communicant long before priests and theologians had, by the aid of Aristotle, explained the assumed miracle as a process of transubstantiation; and longer still before their philosophic explanation was, by the ratification of any general Council, given its place amongst the definite teachings of the Church. Similarly, the devotion to the Virgin Mary first sprang up amongst the mass of believers naturally, because the idea of God’s mother, with all her motherly love, with all her virgin purity, and with all her human sorrows allied so closely to omnipotence, touched countless hearts {228} in a way which was in all cases practically similar; just as the offer of a helping hand would make a similar appeal to each one of a multitude of men drowning. The official teaching of the Church with regard to the Virgin’s sinlessness, and the degree of worship which is her due, has been the work, no doubt, of the few, not of the many—of priests, of theologians, of Councils, of the spiritual aristocracy; but the doctrines which they have thus defined have been no more fabricated by themselves than the wines, good or bad, which a peasantry have made for centuries, are made by the chemist of to-day, who at last undertakes to analyse them.