In this investigation of the influence of Catholicism, we must carefully keep separate what it did for the people and what it did for itself. When we think of the stately monastery, an embodiment of luxury, with its closely-mown lawns, its gardens and bowers, its fountains and many murmuring streams, we must connect it not with the ague-stricken peasant dying without help in the fens, but with the abbot, his ambling palfrey, his hawk and hounds, his well-stocked cellar and larder. He is part of a system that has its centre of authority in Italy.. To that his allegiance is due. For its behoof are all his acts. When we survey, as still we may, the magnificent churches and cathedrals of those times, miracles of architectural skill--the only real miracles of Catholicism--when in imagination we restore the transcendently imposing, the noble services of which they were once the scene, the dim, religious-light streaming in through the many-colored windows, the sounds of voices not inferior in their melody to those of heaven, the priests in their sacred vestments, and above all the prostrate worshipers listening to litanies and prayers in a foreign and unknown tongue, shall we not ask ourselves, Was all this for the sake of those worshipers, or for the glory of the great, the overshadowing authority at Rome? But perhaps some one may say, Are there not limits to human exertion--things which no political system, no human power, no matter how excellent its intention, can accomplish? Men cannot be raised from barbarism, a continent cannot be civilized, in a day! The Catholic power is not, however, to be tried by any such standard. It scornfully rejected and still rejects a human origin. It claims to be accredited supernaturally. The sovereign pontiff is the Vicar of God upon earth. Infallible in judgment, it is given to him to accomplish all things by miracle if need be. He had exercised an autocratic tyranny over the intellect of Europe for more than a thousand years; and, though on some occasions he had encountered the resistances of disobedient princes, these, in the aggregate, were of so little moment, that the physical, the political power of the continent may be affirmed to have been at his disposal.