The just historic calm on which our modern prides himself, is only possible in proportion to the mature completeness with which he takes for granted, and believes that those to whom he speaks will take for granted, the absence of supernatural intervention in the processes of religious action and development. He is absolutely undisturbed by the thought of that claim, which was omnipotent until Voltaire came to do deadly battle with it, of Christianity to be a crowning miracle of divine favour, which should raise men to be only a little lower than the angels, and should be the instrument for pouring out upon them an ever-flowing stream of special and extraordinary grace. It is not until the idea has dropped out of our minds of the great fathers of the church as saints, that we are free to perceive what services they rendered as statesmen, and it is only when men have ceased to dispute whether Christianity was a revelation, that they have eyes to see what services it has rendered as a system. But in Voltaire’s time, if Catholicism was justified historically, it was believed dogmatically, and therefore was to be attacked dogmatically also. The surrender of the written legend has never hindered its champions from taking ground which implied some esoteric revelation, that proves to be some special interpretation of the written legend. So long as the thinker is busy disproving the position that a man who happens to live on a certain part of the globe is a being of such singular and exceptional consequence in the universe as to be held worthy by supreme heavenly powers of receiving a miraculous message and the promise of this and that unspeakable privilege in indescribable worlds to come, so long he is not likely to weigh very fairly the effects of the belief in such power, messages, and privileges, on the education and advancement of this world. The modern historic justice which is done to Catholicism is due to the establishment of a series of convictions that civilisation is a structure which man by his own right arm has raised for himself, that it has been exposed to many an era of storm and stress, and to manifold influences which have been perpetually destroying portions of the great edifice, adding fresh parts, modifying the old, by an interminable succession of changes, resounding and volcanic, or still and imperceptible; that the danger of destruction was never so terrible as in the days of the dissolution of the old Roman society; that in this prolonged crisis the Christian church emerged, first by its organisation and the ability of some of its chiefs, and next by the attraction of legends that harmonised with the needs of a dark, confused, and terror-stricken time; that the many barbarous and absurd articles of belief incorporated in the Christian profession by the sophists of the East, received from time to time humane modification in the hands of the wiser churchmen of the West, whose practical judgment was perpetually