The Church, as has been said already, is ideally the parliament of the whole believing world; but we find, as a matter of fact, that she is the parliament of a small part only.  Now what shall we say to this?  If God would have all men do His will, why should He place the knowledge of it within reach of such a small minority of them?  And to this question we can give no answer.  It is a mystery, and we must acknowledge frankly that it is one.  But there is this to say yet—­that it is not a new mystery.  We already suppose ourselves to have accepted it in a simpler form:  in the form of the presence of evil, and the partial prevalence of good.  By acknowledging the claim of the special revelation in question, we are not adding to the complexity of that old world-problem.  I am aware, however, that many think just the reverse of this.  I will therefore dwell upon the subject for a few moments longer.  To many who can accept the difficulty of the partial presence of good, the difficulty seems wantonly aggravated by the claims of a special revelation.  These claims seem to them to do two things.  In the first place, they are thought to make the presence of good even more partial than it otherwise would be; and secondly—­which is a still greater stumbling-block—­to oblige us to condemn as evil much that would else seem good of the purest kind.  There are many men, as we must all know, without the Church, who are doing their best to fight their way to God; and orthodoxy is supposed to pass a cruel condemnation on these, because they have not assented to some obscure theory, their rejection or ignorance of which has plainly stained neither their lives nor hearts.  And of orthodoxy under certain forms this is no doubt true; but it is not true of the orthodoxy of Catholicism.  There is no point, probably, connected with this question, about which the general world is so misinformed and ignorant, as the sober but boundless charity of what it calls the anathematising Church.  So little indeed is this charity understood generally, that to assert it seems a startling paradox.  Most paradoxes are doubtless in reality the lies they at first sight seem to be; but not so this one.  It is the simple statement of a fact.  Never was there a religious body, except the Roman, that laid the intense stress she does on all her dogmatic teachings, and had yet the justice that comes of sympathy for those that cannot receive them.  She condemns no goodness, she condemns even no earnest worship, though it be outside her pale.  On the contrary, she declares explicitly that a knowledge of ’the one true God, our Creator and Lord,’ may be attained to by the ‘natural light of human reason,’ meaning by ‘reason’ faith unenlightened by revelation; and she declares those to be anathema who deny this.  The holy and humble men of heart who do not know her, or who in good faith reject her, she commits with confidence to God’s uncovenanted mercies; and these she knows are infinite; but, except