122 THE STONES OF VENICE IV. INFIDELITY

or piety to remain in an unquestioning serenity of faith. The Church had become so mingled with the world that its witness could no longer be received; and the professing members of it, who were placed in circumstances such as to enable them to become aware of its corruptions, and whom their interest or their simplicity did not bribe or beguile into silence, gradually separated themselves into two vast multitudes of adverse energy, one tending to Reformation, and the other to Infidelity.

§ 94. Of these, the last stood, as it were, apart, to watch the course of the struggle between Romanism and Protestantism; a struggle which, however necessary, was attended with infinite calamity to the Church. For, in the first place, the Protestant movement was, in reality, not reformation but reanimation.* It poured new life into the Church, but it did not form or define her anew. In some sort it rather † broke down her hedges, so that all they who passed by might pluck off her grapes.¹ The reformers speedily found that the enemy was never far behind the sower of good seed; that an evil spirit might enter the ranks of reformation as well as those of resistance: and that though the deadly blight might be checked amidst the wheat,

* I was here still writing as a Protestant, and did not ask myself what sort of “animation,” on the whole, was in the English and German Noblesse of the Reforming Party. Carlyle and Froude have together told us whatever was best in them. But the really efficient force in the whole business was-primarily, resolve to have everything their own way; and secondly, resolve to steal the Church lands and moneys. Of course the Church had misused, else it would never have lost them: but the whole question is, to my clearer knowledge of it, one of contention between various manners of temporal misbehaviour: the doctrines of the two parties are little more than their warcries, -and in the applications of them both alike false.

The most true and beautiful analysis of the entire debate that I know in literature is given in three of Scott’s novels-if you know how to read them-The Monastery, The Abbot, and Old Mortality. [1881.]

† Rather so, certainly! Life had been before a labyrinth; but became then, a desert. See Part IV. of the Bible of Amiens, describing the old pavement of the Cathedral. [1881.]

¹ [Psalms lxxx. 12.]

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