The pretension of Protestants that Protestantism favors liberty, and the church despotism, is based on the supposition that authority negatives liberty and liberty negatives authority, that whatever is given to the one is taken from the other; a supposition refuted some time since, in the magazine for October last, in an article entitled _An Imaginary Contradiction_, and need detain us no longer at present. Just or legitimate authority, founded on the rights of God, and instituted to assert and maintain them in human affairs, confirms and protects liberty instead of impairing it. Yet there is no doubt that the church condemns liberty in the sense of the Reformation, and especially in that of the nineteenth century. Protestantism denies infallibility to the church and assumes it for the age, for the state, for public opinion--that is, for the world. The most shocking blasphemy in its eyes is to assert that the age is fallible and cannot be relied on as a safe or sure guide. We differ from the Protestant; we attribute infallibility to the church, and deny it to the age, even though the age be this enlightened nineteenth century. We do not believe it is always wise or prudent to suffer one's self to be carried away by the dominant tendency or passion of this or any other age. It is characteristic of every age to fix upon one special object or class of objects, and to pursue them with an exclusiveness and a concentrated passion and energy that render them practically evil, even though good when taken in their place and wisely pursued. Even maternal affection becomes evil and destructive, if not guided or restrained by wisdom and prudence. Philanthropy is a noble sentiment; yet men and women in our own age, carried away, dazzled, and blinded by it, only produce evils they would avoid, defeat the very good they would effect. The spirit of our age is that of the production, accumulation, and possession of material goods. Material goods in their proper measure and place are needed; but when their production and accumulation become with an individual or an age an engrossing passion that excludes the spiritual and the eternal, they are evil, and lead only to ruin, both spiritual and material, as daily experience proves.