The Papacy has lost all moral basis, aim, sanction, and source of action at the present day. Its source of action in the past was derived from a conception of heaven since changed,--from a notion of life since proved imperfect,--from a conception of the moral law inferior to that of the new epoch in course of initiation,--from a solution of the eternal problem of the relation between man and God since rejected by the human heart, intellect, conscience, and tradition. The dogma itself which the Church once represented is exhausted and consumed. It no longer inspires faith, no longer has power to unite or direct the human race. The time of a new dogma is approaching, which will re-link earth with heaven in a vaster synthesis, fruitful of new and harmonious life. It is for this that the Papacy expires. And it is our duty to declare this, without hypocritical reticence, or formulae of speech, which, feigning to attack and venerate at one and the same time, do but parcel out, not solve the problem; because the future cannot be fully revealed until the past is entombed, and by weakly prolonging the delay we run the risk of introducing gangrene into the wound. The formula of life and of the law of life from which the Papacy derived its existence and its mission was that of the _fall_ of man and his redemption. The logical and inevitable consequences of this formula were:-- The doctrine of the necessity of _mediation_ between man and God; The belief in a _direct_, _immediate_, and _immutable_ revelation, and hence in a privileged class,--naturally destined to centralize in one individual,--the office of which was to preserve that revelation inviolate; The inefficacy of man's own efforts to achieve his own redemption, and the consequent substitution of unlimited _faith_ in the _Mediator_, for works,--hence _grace_ and _predestination_ more or less explicitly substituted for _free-will_; The separation of the human race into the _elect_ and the _non-elect_; The _salvation_ of the one, and the eternal _damnation_ of the other; and, above all, The duality between earth and heaven, between the _ideal_ and the _real_, between the _aim_ set before man and a world condemned to anathema by the _fall_, and incapable, through the imperfection of its finite elements, of affording him the means of realizing that aim. In fact, the religious synthesis which succeeded Polytheism did not contemplate, nor did the historical succession of the epochs allow it to contemplate, any conception of life embracing more than the _individual_; it offered the individual a means of salvation _in despite of_ the egotism, tyranny, and corruption by which he is surrounded on earth, and which no individual effort could hope to overcome; it came to declare to him, _The world is adverse to thee; renounce the world and put thy faith in Christ; this will lead thee to heaven_.