"When we remember that in the Byzantine Empire the renovating power of theology was tried in a new capital, free from Pagan traditions, and for more than one thousand years unsubdued by barbarians, and that in the west, the Church, for at least seven hundred years after the shocks of the invasion had subsided, exercised a control more absolute than any other moral or intellectual agency has ever attained, it will appear, I think, that the experiment was very sufficiently tried. It is easy to make a catalogue of the glaring vices of antiquity, and to contrast them with the pure morality of Christian writings; but, if we desire to form a just estimate of the realized improvement, we must compare the classical and ecclesiastical civilizations as wholes, and must observe in each case not only the vices that were repressed but also the degree and variety of positive excellence attained." Before the art of printing was discovered, the Church had less difficulty in keeping the people in ignorance, but after the invention of that boon to mankind she found herself ominously confronted with the tree of life from which the people would soon learn to pluck the fruit of knowledge. Hence the establishment, by Pope Paul IV., about the middle of the sixteenth century, of the _Index Expurgatorius_, whose functions, we are told, was "to examine books and manuscripts intended for publication, and to decide whether the people may be permitted to read them." This is what his Grace of St. Michael's Palace, in Toronto, proposes to do for the good Catholics of that city--decide what they shall read and what they shall not read, as though they were ninnies and not able to decide that matter for themselves! The fact is, however, that, in this priestly arrogance and assumption, the Archbishop is consistent enough; for, although such mediæval tyranny is altogether inconsistent with the spirit of this age, and ludicrously out of place in 1880, in the City of Toronto, it, nevertheless, perfectly accords with the tenets and spirit as well as the antecedents of his Church; which, while it accuses Freethinkers of "barbarism," allows not an inch of latitude of private judgment in matters of religion, and tolerates no freedom of conscience: And what is this but barbarism? All freedom of conscience was fiercely denounced by Gregory XVI. as insane folly, and the Archbishop of Toronto reiterates this unsavory stigma on civilization. And why shouldn't he? Theology never learns. The Church changes not. How can she when she is infallible? Yet an infallible Pope of an infallible Church, not long since, found himself, while encompassed with many difficulties, spiritual and temporal, to be about like other weak mortals in flesh and blood; and, though infallible, remember, and with the power of miracles and all that, he succumbs and whiningly complains to a vulgar world that he is "a prisoner in his own palace in Rome!" And the heretical and sceptical world--the "outside