Or shall we pass to the constitution of the Church? What is that but the exact counterpart of the constitution of the Roman Empire: the parish modelling itself on the municipality, the diocese on the province, the metropolitan regions on the great prefectures, and, at the top of the pyramid, the bishop of Rome and the papacy, whose ideal dream is simply, in the religious order, the universal and absolute monarchy of which the Caesars had first set the pattern? Or would you consider the moral life and the type of piety? It is true that at the outset, and so long as the persecutions continued, there is a great contrast between Jewish or Christian morals and manners and those of Roman or Greek society. But, with time, the contrast is singularly attenuated. If the Church conquered the world, the world had its revenge within the Church. What is that monkish asceticism imposing celibacy on the clergy, exalting virginity, multiplying pious works of merit, and replacing, by factitious and sterile duties, the duties dictated by nature and essential to society,--what are all these but survivals of a dualism and the imitation of an ideal which, come from the East, seduced the feverish imagination of an expiring world? The monks, the anchorites and their theology of impotent celibates, did they save Egypt, Syria, and Byzantium? During this time, what did worship, adoration, religion, properly speaking, become? Between earth and heaven there reappeared the whole ancient hierarchy of gods and demi-gods, of heroes, nymphs, and goddesses, replaced by the Virgin Mother, angels, demons, saints. Each town, each parish, every fountain, had its patron or its patroness, its tutelary guardian, to whom they addressed themselves more familiarly than to God in order to obtain temporal blessings and the grace for every day. The saints have their specialities like the minor deities of former times. Some cured fevers, some diseases of the skin. This one had charge of travellers, that of harvests, a third of articles that had been lost, a fourth of needed heirs in families in danger of decay. With this mythology, all the superstitions were revived, down to the grossest fetichism: pilgrimages, chaplets, litanies, the veneration of images, signs of the cross, rites and sacraments conceived after the manner of the ancient mysteries. And all this is done with a sort of unconsciousness, very gradually, and as the effect of a zeal that was supposed to be Christian. The heads of the Church recommend missionaries not to destroy the temples of the false gods, but to consecrate them to the true one, and to replace their images by images of the saints, and the rites of the old cults by similar ceremonies. Names and etiquettes were thus changed, but not the things themselves. At Rome, beneath the basilica of St. Peter, a superb statue was erected to the Prince of the Apostles. This was formerly a statue of Jupiter. Its great toe has been worn down by the kisses of