the abandonment of all kinds of religious discussion, as matter of purely personal inclination, and the abolition of all kinds of privileges as incompatible with equality." [All this has been put out of date by the deeds of the Commune and the programme of the "International Society"--viz. "_The burning of Paris_ we _accept the responsibility of_. _The old society must_ and will perish."] The _Spectator_, December 1869, speaks still more explicitly:--"Infirm and crippled though she be, the Roman Church is still the only one who has the courage to be cosmopolitan, and claim the right to link nation with nation, and literature with literature. Such an assembly as the Council is, at least, an extraordinary testimony to the cosmopolitanism of the great Church which seems trembling to its fall; and who can doubt that that fall, whenever it comes, will be followed by a great temporary loosening of the faith in human unity--in spite of the electric telegraph--by a deepening of the chasm between nation and nation, by the loss of at least a most potent spell over the imagination of the world, by a contraction of the spiritual ideal of every church? This ideal, even Protestants, even Sceptics, even Positivists have owed, and have owned that they owed, to the Roman Church, the only Church which has really succeeded in uniting the bond between any one ecclesiastical centre and the distant circumference of human intelligence and energy. But if the consequence of the collapse of Romanism would be in this way a loss of power to the human race, think only of the gain of power which would result from the final death of sacerdotal ideas, from the final blow to the system of arbitrary authority exercised over the intellect and the conscience, from the new life which would flow into a faith and science resting on the steady accumulation of moral and intellectual facts and the personal life of the conscience in Christ--from the final triumph of moral and intellectual order and freedom. It would doubtless be a new life, subject to great anarchy at first; but the old authoritative systems have themselves been of late little more than anarchy just kept under by the authority of prescription and tradition; and one can only hope for the new order from the complete recognition that it is to have no arbitrary or capricious foundation." Here comes in, with its full significance, the great saying of Lacordaire's--"Order I compare to a pyramid reaching from heaven to earth. Men cannot overthrow its base, because the finger of God rests upon its apex."