I might consider the religious revolution of the sixteenth century under several other aspects. I have said nothing, nor intend to say anything, upon its purely dogmatical phase, upon what it effected in religion, properly so called, or as to the relations of the human soul with God and eternity; but I might exhibit it in the variety of its relations with the social order, deducing throughout results of immense importance. For example, it recalled religion to the bulk of the laymen, to the world of the faithful; previously, religion was, so to speak, the exclusive domain of the clergy, of the ecclesiastical order, who distributed its consolations, but alone disposed of the groundwork, and almost solely possessed the right to speak of it. The Reformation caused religious doctrines to re-enter into general circulation, and it reopened the field of faith to believers, into which they had lost their right to penetrate. It had, at the same time, a second result: it banished, or nearly so, religion from politics; it restored independence to the temporal power. {210} At the very same moment that religion re-entered, so to speak, into the possession of the faithful, it parted from the government of society. In the reformed countries, notwithstanding the diversity of ecclesiastical constitutions--in England even, where that constitution is more akin to the ancient order of things--the spiritual power has no longer any serious idea of directing the temporal. I might enumerate many other consequences of the Reformation, but I must restrain myself, and be satisfied with having brought out its principal character--the emancipation of the human understanding, and the abolition of absolute power in the spiritual order of things; an abolition which undoubtedly was not complete, but nevertheless the greatest advance in that direction which had been made up to our own time. Before concluding, I shall say a few words upon the striking similarity of destiny that is observable between the civil and the religious societies, in the revolutions to which they have been subjected in the history of modern Europe.