Reason, conscience, all must abdicate, and all submit.... In the Church, the Christian state must always be a state of minority, for the tutelage that it accepts will never cease. And the authority of the Church, being on this point sovereign and indefectible, could not remain invisible and indeterminate. An imperious logic pushed it from the first to incarnate itself in its organs, more and more apparent and simplified. First it was lodged in individual bishops, then in councils, until the Pope when speaking _ex cathedra_ became the sole authority. In 1870 the Council of the Vatican, by promulgating the dogma of Papal infallibility, drew the irresistible conclusion from the premises laid down in previous centuries. The evolution of Catholicism was completed. The transformation of Christianity into a sacerdotal theocracy was achieved. The first is realised and exhausted in the second, and the distinction we established, when speaking of the essence of Christianity, between the Christian principle and its historical realisations, is not merely effaced; it no longer has any meaning. From which follow two consequences which every day become more clear and patent. The first is that the Catholic Church, notwithstanding the desires of Leo XIII., is fatally condemned to be intolerant and intransigeant towards all others. The second is that it is contradictory to expect any reform in that Church, or even to speak of it; for the Church could not admit the necessity of reform without renouncing all its pretentions. A river never turns back to its source. Catholicism can only exist by struggling for supremacy. It must be all or nothing. At the same time, things are not so simple as our systems. The logic of ideas does not exhaust the reality of life. Behind abstract principles there are pious souls.... In Catholicism there has always been a latent Protestantism, by which I mean a protest, mute or spoken, direct or indirect, of the Christian principle against the oppressions of external and tyrannical authority.... Without the continuous presence of the Christian spirit in the Catholic Church, the Reformation would have been impossible. Without the triumph of the sacerdotal spirit it would have been unnecessary. Protestantism sprang out of Catholicism because it was virtually contained in it. 4. _Protestant Christianity_