To sum up, then; if we would obtain a true view of the general character of Catholicism, we must begin by making a clean sweep of all the views that, as outsiders, we have been taught to entertain about her.  We must, in the first place, learn to conceive of her as a living, spiritual body, as infallible and as authoritative now as she ever was, with her eyes undimmed and her strength not abated, continuing to grow still as she has continued to grow hitherto:  and the growth of the new dogmas that she may from time to time enunciate, we must learn to see are, from her own stand-point, signs of life and not signs of corruption.  And further, when we come to look into her more closely, we must separate carefully the diverse elements we find in her—­her discipline, her pious opinions, her theology, and her religion.

Let honest enquirers do this to the best of their power, and their views will undergo an unlooked-for change.  Other difficulties of a more circumstantial kind, it is true, still remain for them; and of these I shall speak presently.  But putting these for the moment aside, and regarding the question under its widest aspects only—­regarding it only in connection with the larger generalisations of science, and the primary postulates of man’s spiritual existence—­the theist will find in Catholicism no new difficulties.  He will find in it the logical development of our natural moral sense, developed, indeed, and still developing, under a special and supernatural care—­but essentially the same thing; with the same negations, the same assertions, the same positive truths, and the same impenetrable mysteries; and with nothing new added to them, but help, and certainty, and guidance.

FOOTNOTES: 

[37] It is curious to reflect that what Gibbon said as a sarcasm, is really a serious and profound truth, and leads to conclusions exactly opposite to those drawn from it in that witty and most fascinating chapter from which the above words are quoted.

[38] Our Eternal Hope. By Canon Farrar.

[39] See Doellinger’s Continuation of Hortig’s Church History, quoted by Mr. J.B.  Robertson, in his Memoir of Dr. Moehler.

[40] See Phases of my Faith, by Francis Newman.

[41] It is difficult on any other supposition to account for the marked fact that hardly any of our English rationalists have criticised Christianity, except as presented to them in a form essentially Protestant; and that a large proportion of their criticisms are solely applicable to this.  It is amusing, too, to observe how, to men of often such really wide minds, all theological authority is represented by the various social types of contemporary Anglican or dissenting dignitaries.  Men such as Professors Huxley and Clifford, Mr. Leslie Stephen, and Mr. Frederic Harrison, can find no representatives of dogmatism but in bishops, deans, curates, Presbyterian ministers—­and, above all, curates.  The one mouthpiece of the Ecclesia docens is for them the parish pulpit; and the more ignorant be its occupant the more representative do they think his utterances.  Whilst Mr. Matthew Arnold apparently thinks the whole cause of revealed religion stands and falls with the vagaries of the present Bishop of Gloucester.