the subject of special prescription would have been to assign them an importance which they did not deserve; nay, would have manifestly run counter to the liberty of that religion which they taught, and confounded it with the bondage of that Judaism--a bondage of meats and drinks, new-moons and sabbaths, and other externalities--which neither {259} they nor their fathers had been able to bear. And this leads us to remark, that the oppressive puerilities of Ritualism in themselves, perhaps more ridiculous than pernicious, were, in the case of the Jews, and are indeed naturally everywhere, closely combined with another evil no less foreign to the genius of Christianity, which we may call SACERDOTALISM. The Jews and the Egyptians had a closely banded hereditary priesthood culminating in a theocracy; the Greeks and Romans had a sporadic priesthood of special sacred persons, colleges and places; of these a ritual, often cumbrous, seldom graceful, sometimes shameful, generally ridiculous, was the legitimate exponent. Christianity with the performance abolished the performers; prayers were declared to be the only incense, a holy life the only offering, and a people zealous of good works the only priesthood. But this was too good a doctrine for poor human nature to hold by, or at least for the then stage of civilisation permanently to maintain. People were only too glad to get theologians to think for them, and ceremonies to dress up their devout feelings in an imposing though it might be often a tasteless garb. These ceremonies, originally indifferent, by the sacred character belonging to the men by whom they were performed, soon became sacrosanct, and the performing priest naturally attributed a special efficacy to those rites of which he was the instrument. Whatever virtue they possessed was derived originally, no doubt, like everything else, from God, but specially and exclusively through him. He was the conducting rod, the chosen medium of bringing down the spiritual electricity from heaven to earth. Thus he became a wonder-worker more potent than the rainmakers {260} of African superstition. He had but to open his mouth and wine became blood, and bread flesh at the magic mutter of his lips. In a religion thus made essentially sacerdotal, where thaumaturgic rites received such prominence, it was impossible that the ethics of common life should be able to maintain their original place in the idea of its founder. Judaism, in fact, and Heathenism, had been smuggled back into the Church; religion was one thing, moral character another; brigands might rob and kill, and, at the same time, keep up a converse with Heaven by the kissing of crosses, the telling of beads, and the tramping of pilgrimages; the poles of right and wrong might be positively inverted, while piety remained. But a still greater triumph for the evil principle was in store. In the evangelic history of the Temptation, it is narrated that the devil, after trying other methods