of the Higher Criticism. In that sense the term, of course, does not designate a single and homogeneous system, but a vast collection of distinct and militant bodies: materialism, agnosticism, positivism, pantheism, secularism, theism, and unitarianism—for these cannot be called Christian in any clear sense of the word which would not include, for instance, John Stuart Mill or Renan. They may be all safely grouped under the banner of anti-sacerdotalism, and described as a vast modern intellectual movement directed against orthodox Christianity in general and particularly against the Church of Rome, the most dogmatic, conservative, and unyielding section of Christianity and the most powerful and most skilfully organised priesthood the world has ever seen. Non-Catholic sects have no stereotyped profession, they yield and adapt themselves to pressure with curious elasticity, as is so well illustrated in ‘The New Republic’ of Mr. Mallock; the revolutionary movement finds its chief antagonist in the Church of Rome, which wages with it a guerre à outrance. How extensive that movement is, embracing all who accept the results of philosophical, scientific, and Biblical criticism, and how powerfully represented in every branch of literature, even (and conspicuously) in fiction, is too well known and too frequently pointed out by sacerdotalists themselves to be commented upon.
Then there is a distinctively modern force of an ethical character which militates against the authority
