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In our third article on the Abbé Martin's exhaustive work on the future of Protestantism and Catholicity, we disposed of the pretension of Protestants that the Reformation created and has sustained civil and political liberty in modern society. We proceed in the present and concluding article to dispose, as far as we can, of the pretension that it has founded and sustained religious liberty, or the freedom of conscience.

No fact is more certain than that the Reformation has the credit with non-Catholics, if not even with some half-instructed Catholics themselves, of having originated religious liberty and vindicated the freedom of the mind. Here as elsewhere the formula of the age, or what claims to be enlightened in it, is, Protestantism and freedom, or Catholicity and slavery; and it is to its prestige of having founded and sustained religious liberty that Protestantism owes its chief ability in

De l'Avenir du Protestantisme et du Catholi risme. Par M. l'Abbé F. Martin. Paris: Tobra et Haton 1869. 8vo, pp. 608.

VOL. XI.-I

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our times to carry on its war against the church. Protestantism, like all false religions or systems, having no foundation in truth and no vital energy of its own, lives and prospers only by availing itself of the so-called spirit of the age, or by appealing to the dominant public opinion of the time and the place. In the sixteenth century, the age tended to the revival of imperialism or cæsarism, and Protestantism favored monarchical absolutism, and drew from it its life, its force, and its sustenance.

The spirit or dominant tendency of our age, dating from the middle of the last century, has been and is the revival of the pagan republic, or, as we call it, democratic cæsarism, which asserts for the people as the state the supremacy which under imperialism is asserted for the emperor. Protestantism lives and sustains itself now only by appealing to and representing this tendency, as we may see in the contemporary objections to the church, that she is "behind the age," "does not conform to the age," "is

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