but a living body, led by an always active brain which pursues its work not only in this world but likewise in the next world, at first to define it and next to describe it and assign places in it; only yesterday she added two articles of faith to the creed, the immaculate conception of the Virgin and the infallibility of the Pope; she conferred ultra-terrestrial titles; she declared Saint Joseph patron of the universal Church; she canonized Saint Labre; she elevated Saint Fran?ois de Sales to the rank of Doctor. But she is as conservative as she is active. She retracts nothing of her past, never rescinding any of her ancient decrees; only, with the explanations, commentaries and deductions of the jurist, she fastens these links closer together, forms an uninterrupted chain of them extending from the present time back to the New Testament and, beyond, through the Old Testament, to the origins of the world, in such a way as to coordinate around herself the entire universe and all history. Revelations and prescriptions, the doctrine thus built up is a colossal work, as comprehensive as it is precise, analogous to the Digest but much more vast; for, besides canon law and moral theology, she includes dogmatic theology, that is to say, besides the theory of the visible world, the theory of the invisible world and its three regions, the geography of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, immense territories of which our earth is merely the vestibule, unknown territories inaccessible to sense and reason, but whose confines, entrances, issues and subdivisions, the inhabitants and all that concerns them, their faculties and their communications, are defined, as on Peutinger's map and in the Notitia imperii romani, with extraordinary clearness, minutia and exactitude, through a combination of the positive spirit and the mystic spirit and by theologians who are at once Christians and administrators. In this relation, examine the "Somme" of Saint Thomas. Still at the present day his order, the Dominican, furnishes at Rome those who are consulted on matters of dogma; or rather, in order to abridge and transcribe scholastic formula into perceptible images, read the "Divine Comedy "by Dante.[32] It is probable that this description, as far as imagination goes, is still to-day the most exact as well as most highly-colored presentation of the human and divine world as the Catholic Church conceives it. She has charge of its keys and reigns and governs in it. The prestige of such a government over multitudes of minds and souls, susceptible to discipline, without personal initiative, and in need of firm and systematic guidance, is supreme.
It is equal to or superior to that of the ancient roman State with its 120 million subjects. Outside of the Empire all seemed to these souls anarchy or barbarism; the same impression exists with the Catholics in relation to their Church. Whether spiritual or temporal, an authority is more likely to be approved and venerated when, always visible and everywhere present, it is neither arbitrary nor capricious, but orderly, restrained by texts, traditions, legislation and jurisprudence, derived from above and from a superhuman source, consecrated by antiquity and by the continuity, coherence and grandeur of its work, in short, by that character which the Latin tongue is alone capable of expressing and which it terms majesty.
Among the acts which religious authority prescribes to its subjects, there are some which it imposes in its own name - rites, outward ceremonies and other observances - of which the principal ones, in the Catholic catechism, form a sequence to the "commandments of God," and which are entitled the "commandments of the Church." - With the Protestants, where Church authority is almost gone, rites have almost disappeared; considered in themselves, they have ceased to be regarded as obligatory or meritorious; the most important ones, the Eucharist itself, have been retained only as commemorative or as symbolic; the rest, fasts, abstinences, pilgrimages, the worship of saints and the Virgin, relics of the cross, words committed to memory, genuflections and kneeling before images or altars, have been pronounced vain; in the way of positive injunctions none remain but the reading of the Bible, while duty in outward demonstration of piety is reduced to piety within, to the moral virtues, to truthfulness, probity, temperance and steadfastness, to the energetic determination to observe the watchword received by man in two forms and which he finds in two concordant examples, in the Scriptures as interpreted by his conscience, and in his conscience as enlightened by the Scriptures.
