IV. INFIDELITY II. ROMAN RENAISSANCE 125

conscience in the lifetime, or purchasing salvation on the death-bed.

§ 97. Besides this, the reassertion and defence of various tenets which before had been little more than floating errors in the popular mind, but which, definitely attacked by Protestantism, it became necessary to fasten down with a band of iron and brass, gave a form at once more rigid and less rational to the whole body of Romanist Divinity. Multitudes of minds which in other ages might have brought honour and strength to the Church, preaching the more vital truths which it still retained, were now occupied in pleading for arraigned falsehoods, or magnifying disused frivolities; and it can hardly be doubted by any candid observer, that the nascent or latent errors which God pardoned in times of ignorance, became unpardonable when they were formally defined and defended; that fallacies which were forgiven to the enthusiasm of a multitude, were avenged upon the stubbornness of a Council; that, above all, the great invention of the age, which rendered God’s word accessible to every man,* left all sins against its light incapable of excuse or expiation; and that from the moment when Rome set herself in direct opposition to the Bible,† the judgment was pronounced upon her which made her the scorn and the prey of her own

* What a little Edgeworthian gosling I still was, when I wrote this! See Harry and Lucy, vol. ii., p. 274, on the subject of the misery of the Dark Ages in only possessing manuscripts. “And then came the Dark Ages,” said Lucy, “and in the Dark Ages I suppose people fell asleep and could not think of glass, or anything else!” This is the state of the model British-manufactured young lady’s mind, in the year 1825. (Compare also the passage on the “Honour of Knighthood conferred on Sir Richard Arkwright”-and its money representation,-vol. i. p. 229.) I hope St. George’s Museum at Sheffield has already shown some Yorkshire and Lancashire Protestants what a manuscript of the Bible was once, in Bolton and Furness.¹ [1881.]

† To the popular distribution of the Bible, I meant. But it had nothing whatever to do with the matter. Anybody may write out for themselves in ten minutes more Bible than they will learn to obey in ten years.

For the rest the main meaning of this paragraph is right enough, else I

¹ [See a later volume of this edition for MS. Bibles, etc., presented by Ruskin to the Museum.]

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