the theory of the visible world, the theory of the invisible world and its three regions, the geography of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, immense territories of which our earth is merely the vestibule, unknown territories inaccessible to sense and reason, but whose confines, entrances, issues and subdivisions, the inhabitants and all that concerns them, their faculties and their communications, are defined, as on Peutinger's map and in the Notitia imperii romani, with extraordinary clearness, minutia and exactitude, through a combination of the positive spirit and the mystic spirit and by theologians who are at once Christians and administrators. In this relation, examine the "Somme" of Saint Thomas. Still at the present day his order, the Dominican, furnishes at Rome those who are consulted on matters of dogma; or rather, in order to abridge and transcribe scholastic formula into perceptible images, read the "Divine Comedy "by Dante.[5332] It is probable that this description, as far as imagination goes, is still to-day the most exact as well as most highly-colored presentation of the human and divine world as the Catholic Church conceives it. She has charge of its keys and reigns and governs in it. The prestige of such a government over multitudes of minds and souls, susceptible to discipline, without personal initiative, and in need of firm and systematic guidance, is supreme. It is equal to or superior to that of the ancient roman State with its 120 million subjects. Outside of the Empire all seemed to these souls anarchy or barbarism; the same impression exists with the Catholics in relation to their Church. Whether spiritual or temporal, an authority is more likely to be approved and venerated when, always visible and everywhere present, it is neither arbitrary nor capricious, but orderly, restrained by texts, traditions, legislation and jurisprudence, derived from above and from a superhuman source, consecrated by antiquity and by the continuity, coherence and grandeur of its work, in short, by that character which the Latin tongue is alone capable of expressing and which it terms majesty.