The-papacy-its-history-dogmas-genius-and-prospects-wylie

PAPAL RELICS AND PROTESTANT SCIENCE. 437much greater. What rare and precious relics would havestocked our museums, sanctified our churches, enriclied ourhomes, and protected our persons ! We would have been ableto boast of the legs, arms, toes, fingers, and skulls of greatsaints who flourished more than a thousand years ago, andeke the arms, fingers, and toes of saints who never flourishedat all, but the virtue of whose relics is not a whit the lesson that account. We would have possessed the pairings oftheir nails, the clippings of their beard, some locks of theirhair, mayhap a tooth, or a rag of their raiment, or the thongwith which they scourged themselves.We might have possessedone of the many hundred legsof Balaam''s ass, a bitof the ark, or a nail from the true cross. In short, therewould have been no end to the store of venerable lumberthat might have enriched our island, but for our quarrelwith Rome. True, we could not have had our science, towhich nothing is impossible ; nor our commerce, which encirclesthe globe. We could not have bored through mountains,or spanned mighty rivers and friths, or erected noblebeacons amid the w'aves. We could not have bridged overthe Atlantic, or brought India and China to our very doors,the products of whose climes stock our markets and ladeour boards. Nothing of all this would we have had ; butwe would have been more than compensated by the profitabletrade we should have driven with Rome in the spiritualwares with which she has enriched all those nations whohave trafficked with her.For ages before the Reformation, theChurch of Rome,with the wealth of western Europe at her command, didnothing for learning, beyond patronizing some of the finearts mainly for her own ends. Since the sixteenth century,Rome has been obliged to alter her policy, not in reality,but in appearance,* The Jesuits, finding that the humanmind had escaped from its dungeon, ostentatiously took up* " The clerical party wish to instract, and it may be therefore wellto look at what it had done for centuries, when Italy and Spain were in