growth of a thoroughly upright and consistent life, as a life cankered by pride, and generally an unholy life, can be permanently united and reconciled with a true light.

Although the Christian, the Catholic Christian community in our days may strive still to hold fast the historic faith, and in its better members may be, and in some cases undoubtedly is, endeavouring by the grace of God to attain to a living faith, or to remain stedfast and to grow therein, from want of religious knowledge, it scarcely ever, alas, attains to a clear consciousness of how inexcusably defective is its comprehension of the treasure of true religion, and how loose is the coherence of its life with the life of the whole Church.

The less the Christian community attains to this consciousness, and the more it remains a stranger to every feeling on the subject, the greater is the danger.

Christians can feel no warm interest in the empty shadow which has been imposed upon them in the

place of the living and quickening idea of the Catholic Church.

The writer of these lines knows that, if in the hard-fought religious struggles of his youth no other representation of the Church had come before him, he must have fallen irretrievably into heresy and subjectivity; and he also knows that, in the like case, many others would have shared the same fate, and just those too who were in earnest about their salvation.

What does this shadow, which has succeeded in substituting itself in the place of the living idea of the Church, offer to the believer? At best-even if it rested upon truth-it would offer to the individual the means of assuring himself of the possession of religious truth in the easiest and most purely mechanical manner, of being able to verify at any given moment whether his religious thought kept pace exactly with the orthodox standard.

Thus he is only too easily brought, first to

feel obscurely, and at last, when assailed in every imaginable form by temptations from within and from without, by the mockery and scorn of the world, to cry out, What is Hecuba to me? He comes to consider the Church as an institution which he is at liberty to criticise as if he were a stranger to her; he is ever less and less at his ease in her, and, at last, he is wholly separated from her, although, as most often happens, he does not think it worth his while, or refrains through worldly reasons, from making it

known.

The Catholic, on the contrary, who has gained the true idea of the Church, is inseparably united to her so far as sin has not killed faith within him. He knows what the Church is. No disfigurement or obscuration within her can cause him any perplexity with regard to her. He feels her sufferings; they are his own. Even if human tyranny within her should threaten him with the worst, with sufferings which to a Christian

mind are harder than any bodily sufferings, with the unjust infliction of those extreme spiritual penalties which were entrusted to her use by her Divine Head for the sole purpose of animating and preserving, not of killing, he says with David, when persecuted by Saul, Si Dominus incitat te adversum me, odoretur sacrificium: si autem filii hominum, maledicti sunt in conspectu Domini, qui ejecerunt me hodie, ut non habitem in haereditate Domini, dicentes, Vade, servi diis alienis.' "If the Lord have stirred thee up against me, let him accept an offering: but if they be the children of men, cursed are they before the Lord; for they have driven me out this day from abiding in the inheritance of the Lord, saying, Go, serve other Gods." (1 Sam. xxvi. 19.) Never does such a Catholic suffer himself to be tempted to evil by this heartless challenge, but he behaves in the manner described so impressively and in so few words by St Augustine in his little work, De Verâ

*

Religione, cap. iv. Church history presents many examples of this truly Catholic conduct, but never of a time when the true doctrine of the Church, her nature and divine constitution, has experienced so serious an obscuration as we see in our days, not only carried to excess by individuals, but overspreading the Church more

* The passage runs thus: "Divine Providence often permits even good men to be driven out of the Catholic community by dissensions caused by carnally-minded persons. Let them bear this disgrace or this injustice with the greatest patience, in order, as far as in them lies, not to disturb the peace of the Church; let them introduce no novelties either of schism or false doctrine, and thus they will teach men by example with what hearty sincerity and purity of love we must serve God. And it is the mission of such men, either to return when the storm is allayed, or, (if that is forbidden them, either because the storm still lasts, or in order that no new and still more violent one may arise,) to benefit those very persons to whose tumult and disorder they give place, and without forming any private school, and far removed from all schism and disunion, to defend to the death, and to prove by their testimony, the faith which they are sure is that which the Catholic Church confesses. Such the Father, who seeth in secret, crowns in secret. (Matt. vi. 18.) The case is not common, yet examples are not altogether wanting, and indeed are more frequent than would be supposed." So far St Augustine in the place cited.