“It is surely remarkable,” says this brilliant writer, “that neither the moral revolution of the eighteenth century nor the moral counter-revolution of the nineteenth should have in any perceptible degree added to the domain of Protestantism. During the former period whatever was lost to Catholicism was lost also to Christianity; during the latter whatever was regained by Christianity in Catholic countries was regained also by Catholicism. We should naturally have expected that many minds, on the way from superstition to infidelity, or on the way back from infidelity to superstition, would have stopped at an intermediate point. Between the doctrines taught in the schools of the Jesuits, and those which were maintained at the little supper-parties of the Baron Holbach, there is a vast interval in which the human mind, it should seem, might find for itself some resting-place more satisfactory than either of the two extremes; and at the time of the Reformation millions found such a resting-place. Whole nations then renounced popery without ceasing to believe in a First Cause, in a future life, or in the divine authority of Christianity. In the last century, on the contrary, when a Catholic renounced his belief in the Real Presence, it was a thousand to one that he renounced his belief in the Gospel too; and when the reaction took place, with belief in the Gospel came back belief in the Real Presence. We by no means venture to deduce from these phenomena any general law; but we think it a most remarkable fact that no Christian nation which did not adopt the principles of the Reformation before the end of the sixteenth century should ever have adopted them. Catholic communities have since that time become infidel and become Catholic again, but none has become Protestant.”