Let us therefore here set forth the radical opposition between the Catholic principle and the Protestant principle in order that we may thoroughly understand the internecine war that was henceforth to be waged between them. In vain will eminent men in both camps, with the most generous and conciliatory intentions, arise and endeavour to find some middle ground, and effect a pacific reunion of the two halves of Christendom. All compromises, all diplomatic negotiations, will fail, because each of the two principles can only subsist by the negation of the other. Having attained to salvation, to full communion with God, independently of and in collision with the authority and the discipline of the sacerdotal Church, how could Luther recognise them any longer as divine and submit to them with sincerity and confidence? The ancient edifice had been the more thoroughly ruined, inasmuch as it had become useless and had been replaced. The originality of Luther consisted in this: his religious enfranchisement sprang from his own piety, and he founded his freedom on his sense of sonship, on the sense he had of his quality and titles as a child and heir of God. How could such a consciousness submit itself to the yoke again without denying itself? Catholicism, on the other hand, cannot be less intransigeant. To recognise in any degree whatever that it is possible to a Christian to enjoy pardon and the sense of the divine fatherhood apart from its dogmas and its priesthood, would not this be to abdicate all its pretensions, and to transform itself to the point of destruction?