so great a shock, and was not only ready to go over to, but had actually allied itself with the intellectual, there was great danger to ecclesiastical authority. And hence we need not be surprised that an impression began to prevail among the clear-thinking men of the time that the real functions of that authority were completed in producing the partially-civilized condition to which Europe had attained, the course of events tending evidently to an elimination of that authority as an active element in the approaching European system. [Sidenote: The excuses of ecclesiasticism.] To such the Church might emphatically address herself, pointing out the signal and brilliant results to which she had given rise, and displaying the manifest evils which must inevitably ensue if her relations, as then existing, should be touched. For it must have been plain that the first effect arising from the coalition of the intellectual with the moral element would be an assertion of the right of private judgment in the individual--a condition utterly inconsistent with the dominating influence of authority. It was actually upon that very principle that the battle of the Reformation was eventually fought. She might point out--for it needed no prophetic inspiration--that, if once this principle was yielded, there could be no other issue in Christendom than a total decomposition; that though, for a little while, the separation might be limited to a few great confessions, these, under the very influence of the principle that had brought themselves into existence, must, in their turn, undergo disintegration, and the end of it be a complete anarchy of sects. [Sidenote: Her feeble resistance.] In one sense it may be said that it was in wisdom that the Church took her stand upon this point, determining to make it her base of resistance; unwisely in another, for it was evident that she had already lost the initiative of action, and that her very resistance would constitute the first stage in the process of decomposition.