There are also men standing high in the public estimation, and some of them deservedly so in other respects, who imagine that the decree of the Vatican Council defining the prerogatives of the successor of St. Peter has seriously altered the constitution of the Catholic Church, when it has done nothing more or less than make the common law of the church, whose binding force from universal usage and universal reception was admitted, a statute law. Starting off from this serious mistake as their premise, they wax warm and become furious against the Vatican Council and its decree concerning the Roman Pontiff. And the new-born pity with which they are seized for benighted Catholics, would be worthy of all admiration, were there not good grounds to question their common sense or suspect their sincerity. They talk about “a pontifical Cæsar imposed upon the Catholic Church,” “priestly domination carried to its highest point of development,” “the _personal_ infallibility of the pope,” “the Roman Church transformed into an enlarged house of the Jesuit Order,” “the incompatibility of the Catholic Church, with its _new_ constitution, with the state,” etc., etc. Then follows a jeremiad over “the mental dependency of Catholics,” and so forth. All this and much more has, according to their opinion, been accomplished by a single decree of the Vatican Council. Apparently this class of men look upon the Catholic Church as a mere piece of mechanism, abandoned to the control and direction of a set of priests swayed by personal ambition and selfishness, and whose sole aim is to exercise an absolute tyranny over the consciences of their fellow-Christians; or as an institution still more absurd and vile, for heresy and infidelity have in some instances succeeded in so blinding men’s minds that they do not allow the good the church does as hers, and, stimulated by malice, heap upon her every conceivable vice and evil. Christ had to defend himself against the Jews, who accused him of being possessed by a devil; and is it a wonder that his church should have to defend herself against the charge of misbelievers and unbelievers as being the synagogue of Satan? The servant is not greater than his master. Even Goethe, in spite of his anti-Christian, or rather his anti-Protestant, instincts, would have saved these men from their fanatical blindness and their gross errors by imparting to their minds, if they were willing to receive it, a true insight into the real character of the Catholic Church. “Look,” he says, after premising that “poems are like stained glasses—” “Look into the church from the market square; Nothing but gloom and darkness there! Shrewd Sir Philistine sees things so: Well may he narrow and captious grow Who all his life on the outside passes.