Excerpt from Notes on Religion I call them abuses, one might more prop erly call them uses for they were simply devices which were useful, indeed necessary to the church's supremacy. The first of these abuses was the incorporation into the Catholic church of the Old Roman religion, the accept ance by the church of the pomp and ritual which formed an historic part of the Roman imagination. This ecclesiastical pomp with its elaborate ceremonies was modeled upon classic tradition. From the point of view of historic continuity the successorship of the Roman Catholic Church to the Roman Empire is the most interesting fact in history. The old Ro man ritual, the Roman spirit of obedience, the Roman worship of external display, and the Roman passion for universal domination have been delivered over to the modern world in unbroken continuity. Yet, of course, all of these things have come to occupy towards the modern world a strange and incongruous rela tion. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.