What a marvellous structure it is, with its hierarchy ranging through long centuries almost from apostolic days to our own; living side by side with forms of civilisation and uncivilisation, the most diverse and the most contradictory, through all the fifteen hundred years and more of its existence; asserting an effective control over opinions and institutions; with its pontificate (as is claimed) dating from the fisherman of Galilee, and still reigning there in the city that heard Saint Peter preach, and whom it saw martyred; impiously pretending to sit in his chair and to bear his keys; shaken, exiled, broken again and again by schism, by Lutheran revolts and French revolutions; yet always righting itself and reasserting a vitality that neither force nor opinion has yet been able to extinguish. Once with its foot on the neck of kings, and having the fate of empires in its hands, and even yet superintending the grandest ecclesiastical mechanism that man ever saw; ordering fast days and feast days, and regulating with omnipotent fiat the very diet of millions of people; having countless bands of religious soldiery trained, organized, and officered as such a soldiery never was before nor since; and backed by an infallibility that defies reason, an inquisition to bend or break the will, and a confessional to unlock all hearts and master the profoundest secrets of all consciences. Such has been the mighty Church of Rome, and there it is still, cast down, to be sure, from what it once was, but not yet destroyed; perplexed by the variousness and freedom of an intellectual civilisation, which it hates and vainly tries to crush; laboriously trying to adapt itself to the Europe of the nineteenth century, as it once did to the Europe of the twelfth; lengthening its cords and strengthening its stakes, enlarging the place of its tent, and stretching forth the curtains of its habitations, even to this Republic of the New World. The only wonder is that such a church should be able to push its fortunes so far into the centre of modern civilization, with which it can feel no sympathy, and which it only embraces to destroy. I confess I find it difficult to believe that a total lie could administer comfort and aid to so many millions of souls; and the explanation is, no doubt, that it is all not a total lie; for even its worse doctrines are founded on certain great truths which are accepted by the common heart of humanity.