manifold, and ramified throughout the whole organisation of the Church. It will be enough to name three: first, the lowering and secularising of the episcopate and priesthood by contact with courts and their ambitions; secondly, the suspension of the spiritual liberty of the Church in its discipline, synods, and tribunals; and, thirdly, the protection given by kings to unsound teachers, as Van Espen, de Hontheim in canon law, and in theology to the authors of the Four Articles, by Louis the Fourteenth. In this sense it is most true that the Lutheran movement has steadily penetrated into Catholic countries. This excessive regalism produced its inevitable reaction, and the revolutions of this century have paralysed all royal supremacies by establishing the doctrine that the State, as such, has no religion.
It may therefore be said that the second period of the Christian world has closed. Of thirty-six crowned heads ten are still Catholic, two are of the Greek separation, twenty-four are nominally Protestant. The people of many and great nations are faithful and fervent children of the Catholic Church, but the Revolution either openly or secretly, in its substance or in its spirit, is behind every throne and in almost every government and legislature of the Christian world. The public laws even of the
