way. Therefore the society of the Catholic Church, so fruitful in good, would be impossible unless the wise would forego their power of criticising the simplicity of the simple. We hold that charity and union are the essentials, and that, intellectually, souls must have liberty to approach to the truth in one visible and organic communion, but in divers ways. Here on earth the wisest of us see but dimly. "The best in this kind are but as shadows," one might say of our definitions and doctrines as well as of our rites and acts of worship. But love, fraternity, charity-these are realities, the only truly known realities; to these things the Catholic Church clings with a kind of desperate attachment; for these it willingly has undergone every kind of imputation from those who care little for charity, but think that an exact line of demarcation can be drawn between the province of the intellectually true and false.

How beautifully does the Church chant in Passion Week: "Ubi caritas, et amor, ibi Deus est. Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor. Ne nos mente dividamur caveamus."

In order to dwell together in earthly States

or cities, men must forego the exercise of a certain kind of individual liberty which they might have had did they dwell savagely apart. So also, in the spiritual city, they must, if they would secure the blessings of peace and common action, and enjoy the highest spiritual freedom, make surrender of some lower freedom in expression of thought.

The Catholic Church has has uniformity in diversity. It is like a vast cathedral with choir and nave, and aisles, and transepts, crypt and cloisters, and many chapels, yet with a unity of its own, and with one high altar at which the great acts of central worship are performed. You may, if you choose, wander through the dim places, and kneel before this altar or that image, so long as you share in the central adoration; or you may, if you please, cleave to that alone.

Nowhere is liberty so well reconciled with order as in the spiritual city. I invite you to enter, not only that you may have more order, but that you may have more real liberty of thought and feeling. In the political world there is no true liberty without the security

and protection given by order. So also it is in the spiritual world. The Pax Romana is in the spiritual sphere that which the Pax Britannica is in the secular. As in India the British rule has suppressed robber chiefs and races, so the Catholic Church contends against intellectual marauders, and petty tyrants, and heresies, in order that the spiritual civilisation may flourish.

Only in the Catholic Church can be at all fully realised the highest social ideal, that of men living together as brethren and fellowcitizens in a single world-wide and yet organically united and living society. Independent national or racial Churches, whether Russian or English, can indeed, like independent nations, enter into alliances, and have more or less friendly relations with one another. They can never have organic unity like that which one member of a living body has with another. Yet was it to anything less than this that our Lord pointed, or St. Paul?

I have already written at too great length, and I will say no more at present, but I do believe, my dear Mr. Bevor, that it is the will

of God that you should some day, and in His own time, enter the Catholic Church. You will be weary of wandering-in youth a not unpleasing excitement-from place to place, through mountains, and deserts, and enticing plains in the spiritual regions, and will find your last home and abiding-place in the City of Peace, the New Jerusalem on earth, and with joy she will receive you, and, I trust, many others of our noble English race.

You will allow me, as an old man, to add that so long as I live I shall ever take the utmost interest in your history and spiritual welfare.—I remain, very sincerely yours,

OSWALD GERARD, S.J.

Gerald Beechcroft had been at Eton with Bertram Bevor, and had thence gone to Cambridge. He possessed a property in Kent, and had for a space sat in Parliament, and had travelled. His line of life had hardly run parallel with Bevor's, and they had not frequently met; but when they did meet, each felt more disposed to talk intimately to the

other than he did to persons with whom he was in frequent intercourse. Though the outer course of their lives was different, each felt that the other was travelling by much the same road of mental development, and meeting with the same spiritual adventures.

This was Gerald Beechcroft's letter:

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DEAR BEVOR,

ESTLING, ASHford, Kent,

28th April 1898.

I felt interest, but no surprise, when I saw in the Times that you had joined the Catholic Church. It seems to me a very natural place for you to inhabit. I remembered various conversations which we had had which seemed

to point to this conclusion. Some years ago I should have felt much surprised if I could have suddenly foreseen that I should myself have one day felt attracted towards that Church; yet it is the fact that at intervals during the last two or three years I have been sensible of the attraction. I hope that it will not bore you to read that which I am about to write at some