Difficulties?—­Why, there were ten thousand.  He did not in the least understand why God had made the world as it was, nor how Hell could be the creation of Love, nor how bread was transubstantiated into the Body of God but—­well, these things were so.  He had travelled far, he began to see, from his old status of faith, when he had believed that divine truth could be demonstrated on intellectual grounds.  He had learned now (he knew not how) that the supernatural cried to the supernatural; the Christ without to the Christ within; that pure human reason indeed could not contradict, yet neither could it adequately prove the mysteries of faith, except on premisses visible only to him who receives Revelation as a fact; that it is the moral state, rather than the intellectual, to which the Spirit of God speaks with the greater certitude.  That which he had both learned and taught he now knew, that Faith, having, like man himself, a body and a spirit—­an historical expression and an inner verity—­speaks now by one, now by another.  This man believes because he sees—­accepts the Incarnation or the Church from its credentials; that man, perceiving that these things are spiritual facts, yields himself wholly to the message and authority of her who alone professes them, as well as to the manifestation of them upon the historical plane; and in the darkness leans upon her arm.  Or, best of all, because he has believed, now he sees.

So he looked with a kind of interested indolence at other tracts of his nature.

First, there was his intellect, puzzled beyond description, demanding, Why, why, why?  Why was it allowed?  How was it conceivable that God did not intervene, and that the Father of men could permit His dear world to be so ranged against Him?  What did He mean to do?  Was this eternal silence never to be broken?  It was very well for those that had the Faith, but what of the countless millions who were settling down in contented blasphemy?  Were these not, too, His children and the sheep of His pasture?  What was the Catholic Church made for if not to convert the world, and why then had Almighty God allowed it, on the one side, to dwindle to a handful, and, on the other, the world to find its peace apart from Him?

He considered his emotions, but there was no comfort there, no stimulus.  Oh! yes; he could pray still, by mere cold acts of the will, and his theology told him that God accepted such.  He could say “Adveniat regnum tuum. ...  Fiat voluntas tua,” five thousand times a day, if God wanted that; but there was no sting or touch, no sense of vibration through the cords that his will threw up to the Heavenly Throne.  What in the world then did God want him to do?  Was it just then to repeat formulas, to lie still, to open despatches, to listen through the telephone, and to suffer?