126 THE STONES OF VENICE IV. INFIDELITY

children, and cast her down from the throne where she had magnified herself against heaven, so low, that at last the unimaginable scene of the Bethlehem humiliation was mocked in the temples of Christianity. Judea had seen her God laid in the manger of the beast of burden: it was for Christendom to stable the beast of burden by the altar of her God.

§ 98. Nor, on the other hand, was the opposition of Protestantism to the Papacy less injurious to itself. That opposition was, for the most part, intemperate, undistinguishing, and incautious. It could indeed hardly be otherwise. Fresh bleeding from the sword of Rome, and still trembling at her anathema, the reformed churches were little likely to remember any of her benefits, or to regard any of her teaching. Forced by the Romanist contumely into habits of irreverence, by the Romanist fallacies into habits of disbelief, the self-trusting, rashly-reasoning spirit gained ground among them daily. Sect branched out of sect, presumption rose over presumption; the miracles of the early Church were denied and its martyrs forgotten, though their power and palm were claimed by the members of every persecuted sect; pride, malice, wrath, love of change, masked themselves under the thirst for truth, and mingled with the just resentment of deception, so that it became impossible even for the best and truest men to know the plague of their own hearts; while avarice and impiety openly transformed reformation into robbery, and reproof into sacrilege. Ignorance could as easily lead the foes of the Church, as lull her slumber; men who would once have been the unquestioning recipients, were now the shameless inventors of absurd or perilous superstitions; they who were of the temper that walketh in darkness,¹

had not reprinted it, and the end of it is not strong enough. The most beautiful Norman church in Chartres is a hay-loft, at this moment,²-such the holy zeal of the Catholic world, going pettifogging about in proclamation of its Immaculate Conception, etc. [1881.]

¹ [Ecclesiastes ii. 14.]

² [The church is St. André. Ruskin had been at Chartres in the autumn of 1880. “You look down on the church,” writes Mr. Rooke, A. R. W. S., “in descending the steep narrow lane behind the Cathedral.”]

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