This as a fact, however, is no more a part of the Catholic faith than the celibacy of a college fellow is a part of the Thirty-nine Articles, or than the skill of an English naval officer depends on his not having his wife with him on shipboard.  Nor again, to take another popular instance, is the headship of the Catholic Church connected essentially with Rome, any more than the English Parliament is essentially connected with Westminster.

The difficulty of distinguishing things that are of faith, from mere pious opinions, is a more subtle one.  From the confusion caused by it, the Church seems pledged to all sorts of grotesque stories of saints, and accounts of the place and aspect of heaven, of hell and purgatory, and to be logically bound to stand and fall by these.  Thus Sir James Stephen happened once in the course of his reading to light on an opinion of Bellarmine’s, and certain arguments by which he supported it, as to the place of purgatory.  It is quite true that to us Bellarmine’s opinion seems sufficiently ludicrous; and Sir James Stephen argued that the Roman Church is ludicrous in just the same degree.  But if he had studied the matter a little deeper, he would soon have dropped his argument.  He would have seen that he was attacking, not the doctrine of the Church, but simply an opinion, not indeed condemned by her, but held avowedly without her sanction.  Had he studied Bellarmine to a little more purpose, he would have seen that that writer expressly states it to be ’a question where purgatory is, but that the Church has defined nothing on this point.’  He would also have learned from the same source that it is no article of Catholic faith, though it was of Bellarmine’s opinion, that there is in purgatory any material fire; and that, ’as to the intensity of the pains of purgatory, though all admit that they are greater than anything that we suffer in this life, still it is doubtful how this is to be explained and understood.’  He would have learned too that, according to Bonaventura, ’the sufferings of purgatory are only severer than those of this life, inasmuch as the greatest suffering in purgatory is more severe than the greatest suffering endured in this life; though there may be a degree of punishment in purgatory less intense than what may sometimes be undergone in this world.’  And finally he would have learned—­what in this connection would have been well worth his attention—­that the duration of pains in purgatory is according to Bellarmine, ’so completely uncertain, that it is rash to pretend to determine anything about it.’