seated on his golden throne, surrounded by choirs of angels, but the God of Philosophy.  The Constitution has nothing to say about the Trinity, nothing of the worship due to the Virgin—­on the contrary, that is by implication sternly condemned; nothing about transubstantiation, or the making of the flesh and blood of God by the priest; nothing of the invocation of the saints.  It bears on its face subordination to the thought of the age, the impress of the intellectual progress of man.

The passage of Europe to Llamaism.  Such being the exposition rendered to us respecting the attributes of God, it next instructs us as to his mode of government of the world.  The Church asserts that she possesses a supernatural control over all material and moral events.  The priesthood, in its various grades, can determine issues of the future, either by the exercise of its inherent attributes, or by its influential invocation of the celestial powers.  To the sovereign pontiff it has been given to bind or loose at his pleasure.  It is unlawful to appeal from his judgments to an Oecumenical Council, as if to an earthly arbiter superior to him.  Powers such as these are consistent with arbitrary rule, but they are inconsistent with the government of the world by immutable law.  Hence the Dogmatic Constitution plants itself firmly in behalf of incessant providential interventions; it will not for a moment admit that in natural things there is an irresistible sequence of events, or in the affairs of men an unavoidable course of acts.

But has not the order of civilization in all parts of the world been the same?  Does not the growth of society resemble individual growth?  Do not both exhibit to us phases of youth, of maturity, of decrepitude?  To a person who has carefully considered the progressive civilization of groups of men in regions of the earth far apart, who has observed the identical forms under which that advancing civilization has manifested itself, is it not clear that the procedure is determined by law?  The religious ideas of the Incas of Peru and the emperors of Mexico, and the ceremonials of their court-life, were the same as those in Europe—­the same as those in Asia.  The current of thought had been the same.  A swarm of bees carried to some distant land will build its combs and regulate its social institutions as other unknown swarms would do, and so with separated and disconnected swarms of men.  So invariable is this sequence of thought and act, that there are philosophers who, transferring the past example offered by Asiatic history to the case of Europe, would not hesitate to sustain the proposition—­given a bishop of Rome and some centuries, and you will have an infallible pope:  given an infallible pope and a little more time, and you will have Llamaism—­Llamaism to which Asia has long, ago attained.