delighting in pomp and parade and glittering show, with a religion of which, like the philosophy of the porch, the most prominent feature was unworldliness, humility, and spirituality. Here unquestionably was danger: an alliance in which, as in an ill-consorted marriage, the lower element was as likely to drag down the higher as the higher to lift up the lower. And so it actually happened. The Church was secularised. Alongside of the hundred and one monkeries of stolid asceticism and the hundred and one mummeries of sacerdotal ceremonialism, there grew up in the process of the ages a consolidated hierarchy of such concentrated, secular, and sacred potency that the loftiest crowned heads of Europe ducked beneath its shadow and quailed beneath its ban. To understand this, we must take note of the change by which the scattered presbyters of the primitive Church were gradually massed into a strong aristocracy, which in due season, after the fashion of the State, found its key-stone in an ecclesiastical monarch. It was the wisdom of the founders of the Christian Church not to lay down any fixed norm of official administration, but to leave all the external machinery of a purely spiritual institution free to adapt itself to the existing forms of society as time and circumstance and national genius might demand. The form of government natural to the Church in its earliest stages was democratic, with a certain loose, ill-defined element of presidential aristocracy. But in an age which had bidden a long farewell both to the spirit and the form of democracy in civil administration, such a form of government in the Church could not hope to maintain itself. Under the influence of the magnificent autocracy of Rome in its decadence, the simple overseer or superintendent (ἐπίσκοπος) of a remote provincial congregation of believers gradually grew into a metropolitan dignitary, and culminated in the wielder of a secular sovereignty sitting in council with the most influential monarchs of Europe. The epiphany of an absolute monarch with a triple tiara on his head when contrasted with the simplicity and unworldliness of the primitive bishops wears such a strange look that it has been judged, especially in Protestant countries, with a more sweeping severity than it deserved. As a mere form of government, no man can give any good reason why the Church should not be governed by a monarch as well as the State; the bishop of Rome, as supreme head of the body of bishops all over Christendom, and guided by them as his habitual advisers, was at least as natural and as reasonable a guide for the direction of the conscience of Christendom in the Middle Ages as the Council of Protestants who at Dort, in the year 1618, condemned the greatest theologian and jurist of the day to pine in a Dutch prison, or the Assembly of Divines in Westminster who empowered the supreme magistrate to suppress the right of free thought in the breasts of all persons who were not prepared to