There is another confusion which we must endeavor to avoid, if we would really get at the truth of this matter. When one ventures to doubt whether the Catholic clergy has really been an unmixed blessing to Europe, one is generally met by the reply, 'You cannot find any fault with the Sermon on the Mount.' Now it would be too much to say that this has nothing to do with the question we were proposing to ask, for there is a sense in which the Sermon on the Mount and the Catholic clergy have something to do with each other. The Sermon on the Mount is admitted on all hands to be the best and most precious thing that Christianity has offered to the world; and it cannot be doubted that the Catholic clergy of East and West were the only spokesmen of Christianity until the Reformation, and are the spokesmen of the vast majority of Christians at this moment. But it must surely be unnecessary to say in a Protestant country that the Catholic Church and the Gospel are two very different things. The moral teaching of Christ, as partly preserved in the three first gospels, or--which is the same thing--the moral teaching of the great Rabbi Hillel, as partly preserved in the Pirke Aboth, is the expression of the conscience of a people who had fought long and heroically for their national existence. In that terrible conflict they had learned the supreme and overwhelming importance of conduct, the necessity for those who would survive of fighting manfully for their lives and making a stand against the hostile powers around; the weakness and uselessness of solitary and selfish efforts, the necessity for a man who would be a man to lose his poor single personality in the being of a greater and nobler combatant--the nation. And they said all this, after their fashion of short and potent sayings, perhaps better than any other men have said it before or since. 'If I am not for myself,' said the great Hillel, 'who is for me? And if I am only for myself, where is the use of me? And if not now, when?' It would be hard to find a more striking contrast than exists between the sturdy unselfish independence of this saying, and the abject and selfish servility of the priest-ridden claimant of the skies. It was this heroic people that produced the morality of the Sermon on the Mount. But it was not they who produced the priests and the dogmas of Catholicism. Shaven crowns, linen vestments, and the claim to priestly rule over consciences, these were dwellers on the banks of the Nile. The gospel indeed came out of Judæa, but the Church and her dogmas came out of Egypt. Not, as it is written, 'Out of Egypt have I called my son,' but 'Out of Egypt have I called my daughter.' St. Gregory of Nazianzum remarked with wonder that Egypt, having so lately worshiped bulls, goats, and crocodiles, was now teaching the world the worship of the Trinity in its truest form. Poor, simple St. Gregory! it was not that Egypt had risen higher, but that the world had sunk lower. The empire, which