Others would find the point of departure in the ignorance and loss of material powers which mark the entry into the Dark Ages. The fifth and sixth centuries are the wide sections in which to seek the point of flexion and of decline. Others are willing to accept as traditional and on the right line the Christendom of Gregory the Great and St. Augustine of England; but the ninth century is a breaking point and the tenth a final collapse; by the time of Marozia the Church had clearly lost an original character which it never recovered, and that new and degraded thing, the mediaeval Church, had begun to appear. The Church was never more the same. For some few of my own acquaintance the dreadful moment is 1870; the right way was lost with the definition of the Infallibility of the Pope. For others again it is the thirteenth century, with its developing organisation for the repression of heresy and its too strict definition of the sacrament. For a very great body of men in the immediate past (now a smaller number) things began to go wrong with the freedom of the Church under Constantine. Then did lay and state corruptions, imitations or influences of the old Pagan society, begin to thwart the divine scheme. The most popular of the latest Protestant theories is that the thing went wrong almost at once between Pentecost and the predication of St. Paul, and that St. Paul was the author of the evil transformation into a mystery religion of what had before been an ethical society upon the suburban model. As their phrase goes, “Nothing can bridge the gulf between the Gospels and the Pauline writings.” A lifetime ago the point of flexion was put later. In the Protestant thesis of the mid-Victorian day the corruption began about the end of the second century. St. Paul was accepted, but already there was trouble beginning, as revealed in the authentic epistles of St. Ignatius; and manifestly things were becoming Catholic (and therefore corrupt) by the time of the African Martyre, and were hopeless by the time of the Thirty Tyrants. For these scholars the Catholic taint is the natural accompaniment of the decline of civilisation after the Antonines. Now I am not saying that because there is dispute upon the moment of flexion in any directive scheme, because there are debate and diverse opinion upon the point where an upright original began to go wrong, that therefore one may conclude it never did go wrong. But I am free to maintain that such enormous disparities of opinion, and such a ceaseless shifting of it, would be impossible if a plain historical process were at work.