Here is one instance, that will be as good as many, of the way in which the private opinions of individual Catholics, or the transitory opinions of particular epochs, are taken for the unalterable teachings of the Catholic Church herself; and it is no more logical to condemn the latter as false because the former are, than it would be to say that all modern geography is false because geographers may still entertain false opinions about regions as to which they do not profess certainty.  Mediaeval doctors thought that purgatory might be the middle of the earth.  Modern geographers have thought that there might be an open sea at the North Pole.  But that wrong conjectures have been hazarded in both cases, can prove in neither that there have been no true discoveries.  The Church, it is undeniable, has for a long time lived and moved amongst countless false opinions; and to the external eye they have naturally seemed a part of her.  But science moves on, and it is shown that she can cast them off.  She has cast off some already; soon doubtless she will cast off others; not in any petulant anger, but with a composed determined gentleness, as some new light gravely dawns upon her.

Granting all this, however, there remains a yet subtler characteristic of the Church, which goes to make her a rock of offence to many; and that is, the temper and the intellectual tone which she seems to develop in her members.  But here, again, we must call to our aid considerations similar to those we have just been dwelling on.  We must remember that the particular tone and temper that offends us is not necessarily Catholicism.  The temper of the Catholic world may change, and, as a matter of fact, does change.  It is not the same, indeed, in any two countries, or in any two eras.  And it may have a new and unsuspected future in store for it.  It may absorb ideas that we should consider broader, bolder, and more rational than any it seems to possess at present.  But if ever it does so, the Church, in the opinion of Catholics, will not be growing false to herself; she will only, in due time, be unfolding her own spirit more fully.  Thus some people associate Catholic conceptions of extreme sanctity with a neglect of personal cleanliness; and imagine that a clean Catholic can, according to his own creed, never come very near perfection.  But the Church has never given this view her sanction; she has never made it of faith that dirt is sacred; she has added no ninth beatitude in favour of an unchanged shirt.  Many of the greatest saints were doubtless dirty; but they were dirty not because of the Church they belonged to, but because of the age they lived in.  Such an expression of sanctity for themselves, it is probable, will be loathed by the saints of the future; yet they may none the less reverence, for all that, the saints who so expressed it in the past.  This is but a single instance; but it may serve as a type of the wide circle of changes that the Church as a living organism, still full of vigour and power of self-adaptation, will be able to develop, as the world develops round her, and yet lose nothing of her supernatural sameness.