For myself, the study of the system and a comparison of its relations with other religions completed that evolution of my religious ideal which I regard as the principal outcome of my life. The Roman Catholic religion is to me the _reductio ad absurdum_ of all anthropomorphic religions, and such a study of it as was there possible drove me to a logical conclusion on the whole matter, not by a sudden revulsion, but as the gradual and normal growth of a rational evolution of my conceptions of the spiritual life, starting from that stage of emancipation which my residence at Cambridge and the intercourse with the liberal thinkers there had brought me to; the influence of Norton, Lowell, Agassiz, and Emerson especially. In this liberation I am aware of no sudden break in my belief from its crude acceptance of miraculous conversion and eternal damnation for the unconverted, but a slow opening of my eyes to larger truths. If any individual influence other than those I have named came in, it would have been the reading of Swedenborg, which gave me a comprehension of what spiritual life was and must be; but Swedenborg himself had never been emancipated from the anthropomorphic conception of Deity. He was a seer, not a philosopher. Emancipation from ignorance will never be complete, and ignorance and even superstition have their divine uses as infancy has. Once the idea of evolution as the law of life is accepted, the logical conclusion is the reign of law and the rejection of all miraculous interposition, and the perception of this fact by the clever schemers at the Vatican underlies the implacable hostility they show to science and evolution. If they could, they would have burned Darwin as they burned Giordano Bruno. They are, and they must ever be, as the condition of keeping up the existence and power of the Vatican and its peculiar institutions, the enemies of mental emancipation. It is not ignorance which is the enemy of wisdom, but the passion of domination. The Roman Catholic Church with its hypothetical succession of Peter will exist forever, because the necessity of seeing through forms and of obedience to authority will endure as long as humanity endures, for certain orders of mind and certain temperaments; but the political problem of the existence of the Vatican in a free and united Italy, progressive and maintaining her place amongst the European powers, is one the solution of which I shall await with great interest, not regarding the triumph of the Vatican as possible according to its hopes, but not sure that the internecine struggle may not end in the ruin of both contestants, since the Italians have not the courage or the patriotism to accept the only safe measure, formal and complete suppression of all civic privileges for the Pope and his bishops--the relegation of religion to a place outside the organization of government. CHAPTER XL ADOWAH AND ITS CONSEQUENCES