The Church during its best age directed the moral relations of individual men, and attempted, more or less successfully, to humanise the relations of communities.

It satisfied or stimulated the affections by its exaltation of the Virgin Mary as a supreme object of worship; it nourished the imagination on polytheistic legends of saints and martyrs; it stirred the religious emotions by touching and impressive rites; it surrounded its members with emblems of a special and invincible protection.

Catholicism, we have again and again to repeat, claimed to deal with life as a whole, and to leave no province of nature, no faculty of man, no need of intelligence or spirit, uncomprehended.

But we must not forget that, though this prodigious system had its root in the affections and sympathies of human nature, it was also fenced round by a theory of metaphysic.

It rested upon authority and tradition, but it also sought an expression in an intellectual philosophy of things.