CHAPTER XIII
THE CHURCH OF ROME
There is, at the present time, a profound struggle in progress over fundamental religious questions. During three centuries Europe has resounded with the din, and even been watered with the blood, of conflicting sects; at length other and deeper notes have been struck, and we now find the great sections of Christendom eager to unite under a common banner against a common foe—anti-sacerdotalism, if not a yet more revolutionary force which has been called naturalism. If literature is a faithful mirror of the thoughts and tendencies of its age, no one who is at all familiar with modern literature can ignore that struggle, or affect an attitude of indifference to it. During this and the preceding century the number of most powerful writers and thinkers from—Hume to Huxley, from Voltaire to Renan, from Kant to Wellhausen—who have withstood traditional authority in England, France, and Germany is deeply significant. In our own days, though there is a comparative lull in the storm of controversy and a comparative dearth of eminent thinkers on both sides, the struggle is still conspicuous
