But the Catholic Church continued to cling to it as almost the central principle of its being, and continued likewise to connive at an inveterate system of escape from its harsh conditions. Mr. Lea's volume is a long record of reiterated legislation and exhortation against unchastity, formal and actual, and of a series of equally uninterrupted disclosures of the futility of such legislation. And, nevertheless, there is no doubt that, during all the long ages of its history, the Church was the abode and the refuge of a vast deal of purity and continence, to say nothing of the various other virtues by which its members have been distinguished. But the reader sees only the obverse of the medal: he sees a custom of prodigious bearings, if duly carried out, honored chiefly in the breach; and he will be very apt to close the book with an impression that the Church has been through all time a sink of incurable corruption. It is superfluous to say that this impression will be quite as erroneous as it would be to assert that, on the other hand, its practice has kept pace with its high pretensions. Neither view of the case is just. If there is one thing that strikes us more than another, in reading Mr. Lea's work, it is that, on the whole, the Church must have been at any moment a tolerably faithful reflection of the manners and feelings of the time. Its empire was practicable only by means of a constant renewal of the exquisite and everlasting compromise between man's transient interests and his external destiny. Taken as a whole, it never pretended to ride rough-shod over his natural passions and instincts. It pretended to convert them to its own service and aggrandizement. It respected them, it handled them gently. And as these passions and instincts have never been exclusively evil or exclusively good, so the Church has never been wholly corrupt or wholly pure. It has been animated by the average moral enlightenment of the time, and it has grown with men's moral growth. Reared, as it was, upon the primitive needs of men's nature, it is difficult to see how the result should have been different. And if the Catholic Church has lost that firmness of grasp upon human affection which it once possessed, it is not that laymen have become more virtuous than priests; it is that they have become more intelligent. The intellectual growth of the Church has lagged behind its moral growth. Secular humanity is perfectly willing to admit that its sacerdotal counterpart observes the Decalogue equally well with itself; but it contests the right of an institution, of whose long spiritual efforts this insignificant accomplishment is the only surviving result, to impose itself further upon men's respect and obedience. The reader has only to remember, then, that Mr. Lea's volume is not a history of the Church at large, but only a history of a single province, and he will find it full of profit and edification.