Thebais, and the first Capuchins.

The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian,
Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the individual's
private life. The cramping influence of a hard formalist
on a young child, in repressing his spirits and courage,
paralyzing the understanding, and that without producing
indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much
sympathy with the tyranny,--is a familiar fact, explained
to the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that
the oppressor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized
over by those names and words and forms of whose influence
he was merely the organ to the youth. The fact teaches him
how Belus was worshipped and how the Pyramids were built,
better than the discovery by Champollion of the names of
all the workmen and the cost of every tile. He finds
Assyria and the Mounds of Cholula at his door, and himself
has laid the courses.

Again, in that protest which each considerate person
makes against the superstition of his times, he
repeats step for step the part of old reformers, and
in the search after truth finds, like them, new perils
to virtue. He learns again what moral vigor is needed
to supply the girdle of a superstition. A great
licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation.
How many times in the history of the world has the
Luther of the day had to lament the decay of piety in
his own household! "Doctor," said his wife to Martin
Luther, one day, "how is it that whilst subject to