Ideas and dogmas that would not have been tolerated for an instant in the old, pure, homogeneous Roman race, found acceptance in this adulterated, festering mass. This was the true cause of the increasing debasement of Latin Christianity. Whoever will take the trouble of constructing a chart of the religious conceptions as they successively struggled into light, will see how close was their connexion with the physiological state of the Italian ethnical element at the moment. [Sidenote: Successive steps in the religious decline.] It is a sad and humiliating succession. Mariolatry; the invocation of saints; the supreme value of virginity; the working of miracles by relics; the satisfaction of moral crimes by gifts of money or goods to the clergy; the worship of images; Purgatory; the sale of benefices; transubstantiation, or the making of God by the priest; the materialization of God--that He has eyes, feet, hands, toes; the virtue of pilgrimages; vicarious religion, the sinner paying the priest to pray for him; the corporeality of spirits; the forbidding of the Bible to the laity; the descent to shrine-worship and fetichism; the doctrine that man can do more than his duty, and hence have a claim upon God; the sale by the priests of indulgences in sin for money. But there is another, a very different aspect under which we must regard this Church. Enveloped as it was with the many evils of the times, the truly Christian principle which was at its basis perpetually vindicated its power, giving rise to numberless blessings in spite of the degradation and wickedness of man. [Sidenote: Statement of what the Church had actually done.] As I have elsewhere (Physiology, Book II., Chap. VIII.) remarked, "The civil law exerted an exterior power in human relations; Christianity produced an interior and moral change. The idea of an ultimate accountability for personal deeds, of which the old Europeans had an indistinct perception, became intense and precise. The sentiment of universal charity was exemplified not only in individual acts, the remembrance of which soon passes away, but in the more permanent institution of establishments for the relief of affliction, the spread of knowledge, the propagation of truth. Of the great ecclesiastics, many had risen from the humblest ranks of society, and these men, true to their democratic instincts, were often found to be the inflexible supporters of right against might. Eventually coming to be the depositaries of the knowledge that then existed, they opposed intellect to brute force, in many instances successfully, and by the example of the organization of the Church, which was essentially republican, they showed how representative systems may be introduced into the state. Nor was it over communities and nations that the Church displayed her chief power. Never in the world before was there such a system. From her central seat at Rome, her all-seeing eye, like that of