Let us turn now to the other side of the ledger. With all these undeniable failings, I cannot doubt that the Church was, on the whole, a power working for good, and that she would have been far the greatest of then existent powers for good, if only she had been able to work in harmony with other religious, moral, and intellectual movements, instead of threatening and even employing fire and sword against them.

Even the priest's unpopularity had its other side, illogical perhaps but most natural psychologically. The man who hated his parson most might well be he who most deeply felt, and shrank from, his supernatural powers. A modern French-Canadian, in a penetrating study of the Church there, quotes the words of a peasant farmer from whom the priest had turned haughtily away in the course of a heated dispute about tithes. “I longed to plant him a hearty kick on the part which he exposed to me; but then I thought my leg might shrivel up!” For many centuries the feudal lord had been tolerated, and even in a sense welcomed, as a protection against worse evils; and the priest, even at his worst, wielded the most effectual weapons against the Devil. He might damn his own soul every day that he touched the Lord's Body with sinful hands; but his Mass was none the less an opus operatum. One of the Gesta Romanorum tales was composed expressly to illustrate this doctrine.