One of the chief defects of the Saxon mind lay in not fully understanding the constitution of the church, or sufficiently appreciating the essential necessity of her external organization. Hence their misinterpretation of the providential action of the Latin-Celts, and their charges against the church of formalism, superstition, and popery. They wrongfully identified the excesses of those races with the church of God. They failed to take into sufficient consideration the great and constant efforts the church had made, in her national and general councils, to correct the abuses and extirpate the vices which formed the staple of their complaints. Conscious, also, of a certain feeling of repression of their natural instincts, while this work of the Latin-Celts was being perfected, they at the same time felt a great aversion to the increase of externals in outward worship, and to the minute regulations in discipline, as well as to the growth of papal authority and the outward grandeur of the papal court. The Saxon leaders in heresy of the XVIth century, as well as those of our own day, cunningly taking advantage of those antipathies, united with selfish political considerations, succeeded in making a large number believe that the question in controversy was not what it really was--a question, namely, between Christianity and infidelity--but a question between Romanism and Germanism! It is easy to foresee the result of such a false issue; for it is impossible, humanly speaking, that a religion can maintain itself among a people when once they are led to believe it wrongs their natural instincts, is hostile to their national development, or is unsympathetic with their genius. With misunderstandings, weaknesses, and jealousies on both sides, these, with various other causes, led thousands and millions of Saxons and Anglo-Saxons to resistance, hatred, and, finally, open revolt against the authority of the church. XIV. PRESENT SAXON PERSECUTIONS. The same causes which mainly produced the religious rebellion of the XVIth century are still at work among the Saxons, and are the exciting motives of their present persecutions against the church.