Nor did the reformation put an end to the so-called Petrine gospel, the religion of authority, the church founded on Peter, prince of the apostles. It may be that Protestantism is losing what little intellectual character it once had, and developing in a vague philanthropy, a watery sentimentality, or a blind fanaticism, sometimes called Methodism, sometimes Evangelicalism; but Peter still teaches and governs in his successor. The Catholic Church has survived the attacks of the reformation and the later revolution, as she survived the attacks of the persecuting Jews and pagans, and the power and craft of civil tyrants who sought to destroy or to enslave her, and is to-day the only religion that advances by personal conviction and conversion. {169} Mohammedanism can no longer propagate itself even by the sword; the various pagan superstitions have reached their limits, and are recoiling on themselves; and Protestantism has gained no accession of territory or numbers since the death of Luther, except by colonization and the natural increase of the population then Protestant. The Catholic Church is not only a living religion, but the only living religion, the only religion that does, or can, command the homage of science, reason, free thought, and the uncorrupted affections of the heart. The Catholic religion is at once light, freedom, and love--the religion of authority, of the intellect, and of the heart, embracing in its indissoluble unity Peter, Paul, and John. The professor's work on the intellectual development of Europe proves that religion in some form has constituted a chief element in that development. It always has been, and still is, the chief element in the life of communities and nations, the spring and centre of intellectual activity and progress. Even the works before us revolve around it, or owe their existence to their relation to it, and would have no intelligible purpose without it. The author has written them to divest religion of its supernatural character, to reduce it to a physiological law, and to prove that it originates in the ignorance of men and nations, and depends solely on physical conditions, chiefly on climate and geographical position. But in this patriarchal, Jewish, Christian religion there is something, and that of no slight influence on the life of individuals and nations, on universal humanity, that flatly contradicts him, that is essentially one and the same from first to last, superior to climate and geographical position, unaffected by natural causes, independent of physical conditions, and in no sense subject to physiological laws. This suffices to refute his theory, and that of the positivists, of whom he is a distinguished disciple; for it proves the uniform presence and activity in the life and development of men and nations, ever since history began, of a power, a being, or cause above nature and independent of nature, and therefore supernatural.