this view, earnest souls throughout Protestantism, prayerfully reading the Word of God with the intoxicating belief in a personal revelation of its import, were not long in setting up an infinite diversity of creed and practice, wherein for want of any pope, each teacher was his own. Even the monstrosities of the Anabaptists in the earlier time, or of the Mormons in our own, have come to them guaranteed by the same authority which guarantees the sturdy Calvinism of Scotland, the Puritanism of the Ironsides, the mystic spirituality of George Fox and William Penn. Of all this I merely say that, to my mind, such a revelation reveals nothing; and that if the office of the Messiah were but to live and speak for a little while, and charge a few uneducated persons to commit to writing a fragmentary account of what He did and said, and a still more imperfect set of epistolary remarks upon the theories of life and action which He taught, then He has left the world without any secure guidance in the ways of God, or any safe criterion of truth and right.

Surely the cult of isolated texts which is nicknamed “Bibliolatry” is no possible assurance of God's teaching. There are texts which, taken apart, prove almost everything. And conversely there are many vital matters which no set of texts, taken apart, will satisfactorily establish. If anything is clear about the New Testament, it is that nowhere does it profess to set out either a reasoned philosophy of life or a comprehensive scheme of doctrine. Apart from the patent circumstance, that the "Discipline of the Secret" precluded the publication of what may be called the esoteric dogmas of the early Christians, it is obvious that in no one of the Gospels or Epistles has the writer any idea of writing a systematic exposition, or any notion that he is putting on record an exhaustive or complete account of the teaching either of Christ or of the early Church. To them, as to me, the deposit of faith was a body of tradition, providentially safeguarded by the earthly work of the Spirit of Truth, but not depending on nor bounded by the Sacred Books, for it was going on concurrently before and during their construction, by the same authority which adjudicated, first vaguely and afterwards with definite precision, upon the number and office of the Sacred Books themselves.

There is of course another sense in which all Christianity must depend on the Bible, for it is there chiefly that we find the historic warrant for the belief that such a life as Christ's was ever lived at all. But when we have used our Matthew, and John, and Paul, with Clement and Hermas, and the Pseudo-Areopagite and the rest, as we might use our Tacitus or our Josephus; and in the character of historic students have sifted out from these the fact that Christ's life and acts and work and personality are in the main as historic as Cæsar's; then, as a Catholic, I would say that we can collect from that account and the historic facts surrounding it the assurance not only that this momentous Person did found the Catholic Church of which I am as certain as that Cæsar initiated the Empire-but also that in founding it He gave it a commission which, if He was truly

God, was verily Divine Divine Thus it is that when, in course of centuries we find it declared that Matthew, John and Paul are of the canon of scripture," and are to be read as inspired writings, whereas Clement and Hermas, however venerable, are not; then we can go back to Matthew, and John and Paul and re-read them not as mere historical critics, but as humble students of the Word of God-and so are prepared to accept, on their authority endorsed by the authority of the faith, much in their narrative which, as historical critics, we were content to earmark as possibly legendary or of doubtful accuracy, and much in their doctrine which, as mere literature, might not have commended itself to a fastidious taste.

I have desired to define at some length this Catholic view of Christ's revelation and the Catholic attitude towards the Bible, as opposed to the Protestant theories on these matters, partly because it is vital to the understanding of Catholicism, and partly because it is seldom understood by those who stand outside the Church. I now pass to the consideration of some of the main lines of the Catholic teaching. It will be understood that I have indeed nothing to offer but a few suggestions, whose only value, if they have any, is that they have been borne in upon me by reason of much converse with those to whom Catholicism speaks the language of a strange country.

Upon the commonplaces of controversy I do not propose to waste time. The 66 errors of Rome" which exercise the mind of anti-Popery lecturers and other wise men, are for the most part beside the point. Too often they are either flat misstatements of Catholic belief, imputing to us what no Catholic would dream of teaching-as that "the end justifies the means"; or they are a travesty of something which is the merest fringe of that great body of doctrine, such as the ancient usage of Indulgences or the celibacy of the clergy. Of such things, at a fit time, I should not despair of giving you a wholly reasonable account; but if a man desires to appreciate the Catholic Faith as it deserves, it is not with these high points of controversy that he will begin. It is the broad base-lines of that majestic plan that such a one will look for. It is the pregnant words which, by that Living Voice, the Master speaks to all the world and to each man's soul.

I cannot hope to make you know these mighty words-which Paul heard in the third Heaven-which all of us will hear when the last trumpet sounds-which, as we well know, descend at the altar rails into many a simple heart. To the ear of faith, they are not hard to hear; but to state them in the common language of the world, and above all in the customary speech of modern England, is a work that for its full accomplishment must wait, I think, till God shall send again that gift of "prophecy," wherewith He touched the lips of John of the Golden Mouth, and lit the fiery eyes of Savonarola. Yet, however little power there be to do it, we must do the little that we may. For when we look back upon that woeful time when the Body of Christ was torn asunder, and the mightiest semblance of God's Kingdom which the world had seen was rent by civil war, I think we can

not choose but say that these men, however we are to judge their motives or their aim, threw back the world's religious life by centuries.

We have had more than two hundred years of "Phoenix cremation" since the Bull of Wittenberg was burnt; but I doubt if another two hundred will place us at the point the world might have reached, if the party of reform had been led by men of the type of Savonarola and of Thomas More, rather than by Luther and Henry VIII. That is our view; but of those who take any other, we may at least demand that they shall be willing to labour with us to restore the broken unity, to heal the secular war, to point the nations, amid a chaos that seemingly grows worse with every tide of books, to that City whereof the pattern is laid up in heaven, whose walls are justice and whose ways are peace, since it is builded upon the rock of an assured authority, and lit for ever by the light of God.

I must pray you therefore to follow me a little, while I try to tell you what Catholicism means to me. It implies, first of all, a deep tremendous consciousness of the heaven-high difference between good and evil, truth and untruth, righteousness and sin. If it seems to be rigid in its teaching and in its insistence on obedience, it is because it feels that the tolerance which holds that one thing may as well be true as any other, is but an opening of the floodgates of all misery. Tolerance we are perfectly ready to give where it is due. Where a man believes error honestly, only because he is somehow disabled from seeing the truth, we do not venture to condemn him; but we cannot talk of it as if he were as likely to be right as we are, or as if it did not matter which of us was right at all. For when we say that we believe, we mean it; and when we profess to hold the Truth revealed by God in Christ, we hold it as a precious gift, the wanton loss of which would be by far more terrible than any worldly calamity.

As with truth, so with the consciousness of sin. We are reproached, unjustly enough, with some unreasonable hostility to modern progress, and to that all-pervading spirit of emancipation which is the pride of the children of the Great Revolution. Neither with progress, nor with science, nor with freedom, has the Church any quarrel. She has herself in many ways been the promoter and guardian of them all; but she has always been and is and will be jealous of the souls that are in danger, for she counts the risk of moral evil as a thing far graver than material prosperity. As we would all say, surely, in our personal ethics, that no amount of money gain should weigh with an honest man against his moral degradation; so the Church says, upon her wider plane, that no amount of monetary or material progress will compensate a generation, if thereby it suffers moral wreck. "What doth it profit a man," she cries from age to age, "if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" "Woe upon you," she cries to the heralds of comfortable Utopias of emancipation, "if by your recklessness the little ones of Christ are made to stumble and to fall." So much,-but no more. Churchmen have been mistaken, as we all admit, in their application of that principle. You are free to say bitter things about their

politics, if you will. But if you would do justice to the spirit which animated even the narrowest among them, you must remember that the thought which underlay their warfare was the paramount importance of saving, if possible, these little ones among their flock, from what seemed a probable risk of being led to sin against God.

Throughout all the Catholic doctrine and the living practice of the Church runs the same dominant note of the consciousness of sin. That God is above all things infinitely Holy-that every single grave and deliberate sin is a disaster to the universe which we cannot measure—that, in the things of human life, sin is indeed the only real evil that exists, and that to advance towards perfection of personal character is our only real progress-these are the alphabet of the Catholic rule of life. If it be asceticism to hold that our pain and pleasure are of absolutely no account in comparison with any moral gain, then we are all ascetics in our belief, however little we may fulfil that rule in practice. And the reason why we hold each particular sin a woeful evil, is because it appears to us as a direct contempt of God, who is our absolute Lord and infinite Benefactor, and because we feel that to Him by His essential nature, evil must needs be horrible altogether. If we are to talk of justice, therefore, any one rebellion could be enough to forfeit all His grace, forego His promises, and alienate the sinner by the issue of his own choice from that Heavenly Presence wherein no discord dwells.

Not only does the Church so think of sin, but she goes on to say that even if by repentance and in God's grace the direct offence is put away, the rebel absolved, the alien soul brought back into the happy family who are at home with God, yet even so the mischief of that once-committed sin is not put by. For it is the nature of evil to work itself out still, in evil and disablement and loss; and these, which are technically called the "temporal consequence" of sin, must needs be suffered even while there is rejoicing in Heaven over the sheep which was lost and now is found again. It is in this connection that we think of Purgatory. It is the life beyond this life where souls, who are indeed not rebels now but God's beloved penitents, must wait and toil and grow till they have wholly purged away the consequences of forgotten sin, and wrought upon the frail and faulty characters they built themselves, that final beauty of holiness. which is alone receptive of the Vision of God.

But if the Church is stern and terrible in her anathemas on even the beginnings of moral wrong, she is not slow to preach the good tidings of the infinite mercy. I cannot profess to you that the God of whom she speaks is the God of those who go their easy ways and say, "He's a good fellow and 'twill all be well." She dare not bid us think it will be well, unless we will it. "He made us," says St. Austin, "without our consent, but He will not save us so." For with the consciousness of sin, the Church insists by logical necessity on the paramount fact of human freedom. When the human soul came from the creative fiat as a self capable of moral life, VOL. I.-pt. 2.

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and therein stamped with the very image of the Divine, it bore both the mark of responsibility and the inalienable power, in God's despite yet none the less triumphantly, to cause evil things to be, in what was God's fair universe before. Why did He do it? we may all ask; but with our little knowledge of the secrets of the Eternal we cannot give much other answer than that, as far as we can see, it was not possible to separate the transcendent gift of a potential moral goodness, whereby we are indeed ennobled as no other gift could honour us, from its correlative possibility of creating crime.

On Free Will, then, the Church insists; but she insists no less on Grace. If God be stainless purity, He is no less essential Love. If He does not compel us to obey the Holy Law, at least He plies us with inducement, with suggestion, with facility of every kind which infinite wisdom joined to infinite love can offer for our aid. The world which we inhabit is the world our fathers made, and it is beset with the results of old ancestral sin for it is the tragic property of wrong that its ill consequences affect not only him who does it, but also those to whom his life is bound in this great family of struggling souls. We live then, not in a Paradise of God's arranging, but in a Babylon of crooked ways, whose streets are littered with the rotting evil and barred with the accumulated rubbish of that past which we inherit. I do not forget, still less deny, that this same Babylon is a mighty city, wherein are also goodly sights and gracious buildings not a few, with many that, though still imperfect, and it may be dangerous in their perfection, are full of promise for the later time. I am no decrier of the noble inheritance our fathers left us; yet I say that when I think of it as the abode wherein we must work out each of us his own salvation, it would to me seem little better than a fever swamp or stricken city of the plague, were it not for the grace of God.

For, as the Church conceives, the teeming millions who are born and die, at mere haphazard as it were, along the crooked ways, where to the human eye there is no light nor joy, are not forgotten. Up and down, as Jacob saw them, go the messengers of God. To all they come to those who are working out, with fear and trembling always, yet with steady resolution, what they take to be for them the will of God; and to those who are wavering on the brink of danger; and to those no less-nay, rather, more eagerly, if possible,-who have already sinned and are persisting in their sin.

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Up and down, too, go the messengers, in those hard places of the world where circumstance, to human eyes, is as a devil-giant coercing hapless lives not only into pain but into moral wreck. We do not say that evil circumstance, that plague inheritance of ancient sin, is a light thing. think, indeed, that He who judges all of us will make allowance amply. It seems evident that to some the avoidance of a special sin-say drunkenness-is easier than to others. To none, short of moral madness, is sin in truth a necessity; and the madman's acts are not sin. What we conclude