one side, to be but a meshwork of accident and of human motives; and they would ask triumphantly for any traces of the action of the divine spirit.  But the Church, would be unabashed.  She would answer in the words of Job, ’Behold I go forward, but He is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive Him; but He knoweth the way that I take; when He hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.  Behold my witness is in heaven, and my champion is on high.’

And thus the doctrine of the Church’s infallibility has a side that is just the opposite of that which is commonly thought to be its only one.  It is supposed to have simply gendered bondage; not to have gendered liberty.  But as a matter of fact it has done both; and if we view the matter fairly, we shall see that it has done the latter at least as completely as the former.  The doctrine of infallibility is undoubtedly a rope that tethers those that hold it to certain real or supposed facts of the past; but it is a rope that is capable of indefinite lengthening.  It is not a fetter only; it is a support also; and those who cling to it can venture fearlessly, as explorers, into currents of speculation that would sweep away altogether men who did but trust to their own powers of swimming.  Nor does, as is often supposed, the centralizing of this infallibility in the person of one man present any difficulty from the Catholic point of view.  It is said that the Pope might any day make a dogma of any absurdities that might happen to occur to him; and that the Catholic would be bound to accept these, however strongly his reason might repudiate them.  And it is quite true that the Pope might do this any day, in the sense that there is no external power to prevent him.  But he who has assented to the central doctrine of Catholicism knows that he never will.  And it is precisely the obvious absence of any restraint from without that brings home to the Catholic his faith in the guiding power from within.

Such, then, and so compacted is the Church of Rome, as a visible and earthly body, with a past and future history.  And with so singular a firmness and flexibility is her frame knit together, that none of her modern enemies can get any lasting hold on her, or dismember her or dislocate her limbs on the racks of their criticism.

But granting all this, what does this do for her?  Does it do more than present her to us as the toughest and most fortunate religion, out of many co-ordinate and competing ones?  Does it tend in any way to set her on a different platform from the others?  And the answer to this is, that, so far as exact proof goes, we have nothing to expect or deal with in the matter, either one way or the other.  The evidences at our disposal will impart a general tendency to our opinions, but no more than that.  The general tendency here, however, is the very reverse of what it is vulgarly supposed to be.  So far from the similarities to her in other religions telling against