From the earliest to the latest ages of the Church, the complexity thus long ago introduced into her practice has gone on increasing with every generation. Nominally from the very outset a monotheistic religion, Christianity gave up its strict monotheism almost at the first start by admitting the existence of three persons in the godhead, whom it vainly endeavoured to unify by its mystic but confessedly incomprehensible Athanasian dogma. The Madonna (with the Child) rose in time practically to the rank of an independent goddess (in all but esoteric Catholic theory): while St. Sebastian, St. George, St. John Baptist, St. Catherine, and even St. Thomas of Canterbury himself, became as important objects of worship in certain places as the deity in person. At Milan, for example, San Carlo Borromeo, at Compostella, Santiago, at Venice, St. Mark, usurped to a great extent the place of the original God. As more and more saints died in each generation, while the cult of the older saints still lingered on everywhere more or less locally, the secondary pantheon grew ever fuller and fuller. Obscure personages, {011}like St. Crispin and St. Cosmas, St. Chad and St. Cuthbert rose to the rank of departmental or local patrons, like the departmental and local gods of earlier religions. Every trade, every guild, every nation, every province, had its peculiar saint. And at the same time, the theory of the Church underwent a constant evolution. Creed was added to creed--Apostles’, Nicene, Athanasian, and so forth, each embodying some new and often subtle increment to the whole mass of accepted dogma. Council after council made fresh additions of articles of faith--the Unity of Substance, the Doctrine of the Atonement, the Immaculate Conception, the Authority of the Church, the Infallibility of the Pope in his spiritual capacity. And all these also are well-known incidents of every evolving cult: constant increase in the number of divine beings; constant refinements in the articles of religion, under the influence of priestly or scholastic metaphysics. Two or three other points must still be noted in this hasty review of the evolution of Christianity, regarded as a standard of religion; and these I will now proceed to consider with all possible brevity.