RELIGIO US DEMO CRA CY A TYPE 229 



Council. This Council considers how far they are Book in 

 consistent with doctrines already defined, and with 

 one another, and how far, explicitly or implicitly, 

 there is any warrant for them in the Scriptures. It 

 ends with rejecting some, whilst others are reconciled 

 and affirmed by it ; and then these last are added 

 to the authoritative teachings of the Church. But 

 the Council, with the Pope included in it, is nothing 

 more than a lens by which the rays originating in 

 the democracy of the faithful are focalised and made 

 to transmit a clear and coherent picture ; and the 

 Roman Catholic religion, regarded as a body of 

 doctrines which have actually influenced the spiritual 

 lives of men, is a magnified picture, projected, as 

 it were, upon the sky, of those secret but common 

 elements of the human mind and heart, in virtue of 

 which all men are supposed to be equal before God, 

 and which unite the faithful into one class, instead 

 of graduating them into many. 



This analysis of what may be called the natural Catholicism, 

 history of Catholicism may be thought, perhaps, only alluded to 

 to have little appreciable connection with those mutates "he 1 

 social or sociological problems which at present 

 agitate the world, and give to the theory of de- 

 mocracy its main practical interest. But neither 

 Catholicism nor religion at large has been referred 

 to here for its own sake. They have been referred 

 to because the case of religion affords a singularly 

 clear illustration of the essential nature of democratic 

 action generally, because it helps us to understand 

 that action in the affairs of ordinary life, and 



cratic action - 



