no apparent reason why a form of supernaturalism which had lived into and out of two forms of human slavery, and was passing through a third, should have been unable to adapt itself in some degree to modern thought. A creed which, in its most successful period, had conveniently absorbed ancestor-worship as part of its theological propaganda in China, need not, one would have thought, have found it indispensably necessary to the salvation of its votaries to cleave to all the old heresies, inculcated in days when criticism of the incomprehensible and unbelievable involved the unpleasant possibility of being tortured to death, or burnt alive. Nor certainly could its worst enemy have predicted that the infallibility of the Pope would be invented and thrust upon the faithful, as a doctrine whose acceptance was essential to their spiritual welfare, in a period when it was being proved every day and in all departments of human knowledge that what was universally believed to be a certainty yesterday is discounted as a fallacy to-morrow. Nothing in all the long controversy about the Separation of Church and State in France produced a greater or more permanent effect upon intelligent Frenchmen than this preposterous claim of Papal infallibility. Explain it away, whittle down its significance by any amount of Jesuitical sophistry, and still this declaration that a mere man could never be mistaken, because he was the Vicegerent of God, shook the whole framework of Catholic domination, so far as any participation of the State in the matter was concerned. And the career and character of many of the Pope's predecessors rendered the dogma more utterly preposterous to all who had even a smattering of the history of the Vatican than might otherwise have been the case. That John XXIII should have been infallible threw a strange light upon Catholic morality in its highest grades. Yet if Pius infallible, why not John?