If Protestantism has in the long run served the cause of liberty of conscience, the reason is simply that every heresy is an instance of liberty and of that enfranchisement which brings in its train a series of additional heresies. In other words, heresy is the victory of doubt over faith. By doubt Protestantism serves the cause of liberty; by faith it would cease to serve it and would menace it—if it were logical. But the characteristic of certain minds is precisely to come to a halt halfway between freedom and liberty, between faith and reason, between the past and the future. [Sidenote: Protestantism a mark of logical feebleness in those who hold it.] Over and above the dogmas admitted in common, the true Protestant demands further some fixed objective expression of his belief: he attempts—he also—to incorporate it in a certain number of customs and rites which create the need they satisfy and incessantly give fresh life to a faith incessantly on the point of a decline; he demands temples, priests, a ceremonial. In the item of ceremonial as well as in the item of dogmas, orthodox Protestants nowadays feel themselves to be much superior to Catholics; and they have really rejected a considerable number of naïve beliefs and of useless rites not infrequently borrowed from paganism. You should hear an excited Protestant, in a discussion with a Catholic, speak of the Mass, that degrading superstition in which “the most material and barbarous interpretation possible” is put upon the words of Christ—_He that eateth me shall live by me_. But does not this same Protestant admit with the Catholic the miracle of the redemption, of Christ sacrificing himself to save mankind? If you admit one miracle, what reason is there to stop with that or any succeeding miracle? “Once more in this order of ideas,” says Mr. Matthew Arnold, “and what can be more natural and beautiful than to imagine this miracle every day repeated, Christ offered in thousands of places, everywhere the believer enabled to enact the work of redemption and unite himself with the Body whose sacrifice saves him.” A beautiful conception, you acknowledge, for a legend, but you refuse to put faith in it on the ground that it shocks your reason; very good, but you reject in the same breath all the rest of the irrationalities that are part and parcel of Christianity. If Christ sacrificed himself for the human race, why should not he sacrifice himself for me? if he came to a world that did not call him, why should he not come to me who call upon him and pray to him? if God once took on a form of flesh and blood, if He once inhabited a human body, why find it strange that He should be present in my flesh and blood? You want miracles, on condition that you are not to see them; what is the meaning of such false modesty? When one believes a thing, one must live in the heart of this belief, one must see it and feel it everywhere; when one possesses a god, it is in order that he