114 INDOOE STUDIES 



superstition." Its cast-iron dogmas and its bigotry 

 are too much for his Hellenic spirit; but no more 

 so than are the dogmas and bigotry of the Protestant 

 churches. It is clear enough that he would sooner 

 be a Catholic than a Presbyterian or a Methodist. 



The real superiority of the Catholic Church, he 

 says, is in "its charm for the imagination, — its 

 poetry. I persist in thinking that Catholicism has, 

 from this superiority, a great future before it; that 

 it -will endure while all the Protestant sects (in 

 which I do not include the Church of England) dis- 

 solve and perish. I persist in thinking that the 

 prevailing form for the Christianity of the future 

 will be the form of Catholicism, but a Catholicism 

 purged, opening itself to the light and air, having 

 the consciousness of its own poetry, freed from its 

 sacerdotal despotism, and freed from its pseudo- 

 scientific apparatus of superannuated dogma. Its 

 forms will be retained, as symbolizing with the force 

 and charm of poetry a few cardinal facts and ideas 

 simple indeed, but indispensable and inexhaustible, 

 and on which our race could lay hold only by mate- 

 rializing them. " 



All this may well be questioned. To the disinter- 

 ested observer, the ritual and the imposing ceremo- 

 nial of the Catholic Church have about them little 

 of the character of true poetry or of true beauty. 

 These things appeal to a low order of imagination and 

 mentality, and are one secret of the church's influ- 

 ence over the vulgar masses. A man of true taste is 

 no more touched by them than by any rite of pagan 



