to work themselves into power at court, and there, as the 'Chancellors' of princes, try to get something like regular justice done; and naturally enough, to remodel the laws of each nation on the time-honoured and scientific Roman form. Nevertheless, the antagonism of the Church to the national and secular law remained for centuries. It died out first perhaps, in England, after the signature of Magna Charta. For then the English prelates began to take up that truly Protestant and national attitude which issued in the great Reformation: but it lingers still in Ireland and in Italy. It lingered in France up to the French revolution, as may be seen notably in the account of the execution of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, by the priest who attended her. Horror at her atrocious crimes is quite swallowed up, in the mind of the good father, by sympathy with her suffering; and the mob snatch her bones from the funeral pile, and keep them as the relics of a saint. But more. While the Roman clergy did real good to Europe, in preserving the scientific elements of Roman law, they did harm by preserving therewith other elements--Roman chicane, and Roman cruelty. In that respect, as in others, 'Rome conquered her conquerors;' and the descendants of those Roman lawyers, whom the honest Teutons called adders, and as adders killed them down, destroyed, in course of time, Teutonic freedom. But those descendants were, alas! the clergy. Weak, they began early to adopt those arms of quibbling and craft, which religious men too often fancy are the proper arms of 'the saints' against 'the world.' Holding human nature in suspicion and contempt, they early gave way to the maxim of the savage, that every one is likely to be guilty till proved innocent, and therefore licensed the stupid brutalities of torture to extract confession. Holding self-degradation to be a virtue, and independence as a carnal vice; glorying in being slaves themselves, till to become, under the name of holy obedience, 'perinde ac cadaver,' was the ideal of a good monk; and accustomed, themselves, to degrading corporal punishment; they did not shrink from inflicting, even on boys and women, tortures as dastardly as indecent. Looking on the world, and on the future of the human race, through a medium compared with which the darkest fancies of a modern fanatic are bright and clear, they did not shrink from inflicting penalties, the very mention of which makes the blood run cold. Suspecting, if not alternately envying and despising, all women who were not nuns; writing openly of the whole sex (until unsexed) as the snare and curse of mankind; and possessed by a Manichaean belief in the power and presence of innumerable demons, whose especial victims were women; they erected witch-hunting into a science; they pandered to, and actually formalized, and justified on scientific grounds, the most cruel and cowardly superstitions of the mob; and again