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274 age: whatever peculiar strength it may have must be sought in its characteristic methods and institutions, not in a clear antithetic position which would make it the centre of all forces opposed to Rationalism. Those methods and institutions have been noticed in the course of the preceding narrative. In the first place, it has an organisation which is eminently superior to that of any other Christian sect, or of any religion whatever. Its constitution embodies all the several advantages of an elective monarchy and an oligarchy, indeed, it is a moot question amongst canonists whether it is to be called monarchic or oligarchic; and at the same time it avoids the instability of democratic action by theoretically dissevering its power from civil power and appealing to a higher source. Its hierarchy lends a rigid unity to its 200,000,000 of abject adherents, of which the keystone is a figure on whom a vague supernatural halo is cast, and who is now always a commanding and venerable personage. Rome, the heir of the tact, ambition, and vigour of the Cæsars, the richest treasury of art, and a veritable hive of lawyers and diplomatists, controls and utilises the talent, the ambition, and the jealousy of its great sacerdotal army, and with easy confidence commands the attention of the civilised world.

Then the completeness, the unity, and the plausibility of its theological system must be considered. From the days of St. John Damascene until the sixteenth century almost all the talent of the civilised