Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian
eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still
worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in
undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall,
in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch
of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.

We often hear it said that the world is constantly becoming more
and more enlightened, and that this enlightening must be
favourable to Protestantism, and unfavourable to Catholicism. We
wish that we could think so. But we see great reason to doubt
whether this be a well-founded expectation. We see that during
the last two hundred and fifty years the human mind has been in
the highest degree active, that it has made great advances in
every branch of natural philosophy, that it has produced
innumerable inventions tending to promote the convenience of
life, that medicine, surgery, chemistry, engineering, have been
very greatly improved, that government, police, and law have been
improved, though not to so great an extent as the physical
sciences. Yet we see that, during these two hundred and fifty
years, Protestantism has made no conquests worth speaking of.
Nay, we believe that, as far as there has been a change, that
change has, on the whole, been in favour of the Church of Rome.
We cannot, therefore, feel confident that the progress of
knowledge will necessarily be fatal to a system which has, to say
the least, stood its ground in spite of the immense progress made
by the human race in knowledge since the days of Queen Elizabeth.

Indeed the argument which we are considering, seems to us to be
founded on an entire mistake. There are branches of knowledge