private judgment and the absence of any adequate magisterium gives greater elasticity before hostile pressure.
Again the ideal of a higher life which the Church of Rome advocates brings it into collision with all modern ways of thinking. Self-torment will never again be recognised by the world at large as the supreme virtue, yet the ‘saints’ of the Roman calendar are honoured principally for that practice. One of the most recent models whom the Church has raised up for the veneration of humanity, Benedict Joseph Labre, shows the exemplary record of having avoided labour and lived by mendicancy, and having deliberately cultivated the most filthy habits of life. Usefulness to humanity is the principle virtue in the eyes of the modern world, and the Church pays little heed to that in canonisation. In fact, the very essence of its ethical teaching is entirely at variance with modern views; it teaches conformity with an external standard (about which there are innumerable controversies), and this for the sake of conciliating a Supreme Being and escaping His presumed vindictiveness. There is a growing tendency to regard actions which spring from such motives as non-ethical.
So, also, its insistence upon the possibility of vicarious atonement and merit is a vulnerable point; every Christian sect must, of course, admit it, but no others carry the doctrine to such length as is done in the Church of Rome. Its sacerdotal system,
