It would be also a grave mistake, in speaking of the providential mission of the races, to suppose that they imposed their characteristics on religion, Christianity, or the church; whereas, on the contrary, it is their Author who has employed in the church their several gifts for the expression and development of those truths for which he specially created them. The church is God acting through the different races of men for their highest development, together with their present and future greatest happiness and his own greatest glory. “God directs the nations upon the earth.”[50] Every leading race of men, or great nation, fills a large space in the general history of the world. It is an observation of S. Augustine that God gave the empire of the world to the Romans as a reward for their civic virtues. But it is a matter of surprise how large and important a part divine Providence has appointed special races to take in the history of religion. It is here sufficient merely to mention the Israelites. One cannot help being struck with the mission of the Latin and Celtic races during the greater period of the history of Christianity. What brought them together in the first instance was the transference of the chair of S. Peter, the centre of the church, to Rome, the centre of the Latin race. Rome, then, was the embodied expression of a perfectly-organized, world-wide power. Rome was the political, and, by its great roads, the geographical, centre of the world. What greatly contributed to the predominance of the Latin race, and subsequently of the Celts in union with the Latins, was the abandonment of the church by the Greeks by schism, and the loss of the larger portion of the Saxons by the errors and revolt of the XVIth century. The faithful, in consequence, were almost exclusively composed of Latin-Celts. The absence of the Greeks and of so large a portion of the Saxons, whose tendencies and prejudices in many points are similar, left a freer course and an easier task to the church, through her ordinary channels of action, as well as through her extraordinary ones--the Councils, namely, of Trent and the Vatican--to complete her authority and external constitution. For the Latin-Celtic races are characterized by hierarchical, traditional, and emotional tendencies. These were the human elements which furnished the church with the means of developing and completing her supreme authority, her divine and ecclesiastical traditions, her discipline, her devotions, and, in general, her æsthetics. XIII. SOME OF THE CAUSES OF PROTESTANTISM. It was precisely the importance given to the external constitution and to the accessories of the church which excited the antipathies of the Saxons, which culminated in the so-called Reformation. For the Saxon races and the mixed Saxons, the English and their descendants, predominate in the rational element, in an energetic individuality, and in great practical activity in the material order.