manager of mysticism. It receives its highest ideals from across the religious borderland.
It so happened that, in the Middle Ages, religion was pushed forward by the aspirations of Italian statesmanship and by the mental energy of the Scholastics far beyond this, its constitutional boundary and term. In plain words, religion strove to lift even administrative and executive government out of the hands of secular practitioners, thus exceeding its office. St. Augustine, in early days, had indeed countenanced the conception of a Church purely spiritual, in contact with a worldly state. His great mind, however, had recognised the difficulty, or, more strictly, his consummate wisdom had assigned to each its place. But what was given to the founder of medieeval theology was not accorded to his successors; his greatness was taken: his weakness left. These latter, in their speculative imprudence, ran violently down the slope avoided by the Fathers, and thus the Church bade fair to be dragged to the lower level of mere statesmanship by the juristic dialectic of the Roman canonists. The result of all this was the Reformation.
Just as, doctrinally, the Reformation strove to replace the mediatorial priesthood of the clergy by the spiritual priesthood of all believers; so, politically, it consisted in the emphatic, and even violent, assertion by the State of its power over the Church. Hence the absolutism with which modern times opened, when statesmen, turning the tables
