This is the style of Protestant controversy which, except in form, still lingers in this nineteenth century. Protestant devotion, it may be said without sarcasm or exaggeration, consists essentially in a holy horror of popery. Were it possible to eliminate the Catholic Church from human society, Protestantism would at once fatally assume an attitude towards the world wholly different from that in which it now stands. At present, when attacked by evolutionistic pantheism—which means all the sophistries of the day—it takes refuge behind the historic fortress of Christianity, the Catholic Church, and, when encountered by the church, it makes an alliance with cosmism or anything else. Were the Catholic Church not in existence, it would be forced at once to build a fortress of its own; for the Bible is only a breastwork, which must be in charge of a commander-in-chief if we hope to hold it for the sovereign Lord. From the beginning, then, Protestants branded Catholics with a mark of infamy; they were idolaters, worse than pagans, for the most part gross blockheads, who fall an easy prey to the designing arts of priests and monks, who are only knaves and rogues, whose chief aim is to carry out the fiendish purposes of the pope, the arch-enemy, Antichrist, the devil in the flesh; and thus the church becomes the Woman of Babylon, flaming in scarlet, and alluring the nations to debauch. No evidence, therefore, is needed to show that Catholics are immoral, depraved, thoroughly corrupt. To doubt it would be to question the truth of Protestantism and to believe that something good might come out of Nazareth. In good sooth, do not the Catholics, as M. de Laveleye says, admit the fact themselves?