this doctrine.  It is the doctrine of Christ, plain and straightforward; enunciated in such simple words that even a child can understand them.  But the Church announces with a strident voice that there can only be one interpreter,—­the Pope.  Nevertheless Truth has a more resonant voice than even that of the Church.  Truth cries out at this present day, ’Unless you will listen to Me who am the absolute utterance of God, who spake by the prophets, who spake through Christ,—­who speaks through Christ and all things still,—­your little systems, your uncertain churches, your inefficient creeds, your quarrelsome sects, shall crumble away into dust and ruins!  For humanity is waiting for the true Church of Christ; the one pure House of Praise from which all sophistry, all superstition and vanity shall have fled, and only God in the Christ-Miracle and the perfection of His Creation shall remain!’ And there is no more sure foundation for this much-needed House of Praise than the Catholic Church,—­the word ‘catholic’ being applied in its widest sense, meaning a ‘Universal’ answering to the needs of all;—­and I am willing to maintain that the Roman Catholic Church has within it the vital germ of a sprouting perfection.  If it would utterly discard pomp and riches, if it would set its dignity at too high an estimate for any wish to meddle in temporal or political affairs, if it would firmly trample down all superstition, idolatry and bigotry, and ’use no vain repetition as the heathen do’—­to quote Christ’s own words,- -if in place of ancient dogma and incredible legendary lore, it would open its doors to the marvels of science, the miracles and magnificence daily displayed to us in the wonderful work of God’s Universe, then indeed it might obtain a lasting hold on mankind.  It might conquer Buddhism, and Christianize the whole earth.  But—­’If thine eye be evil thy whole body shall be full of darkness,’—­and while the Church remains double-sighted we are bound also to see double.  And so we listen with a complete and cynical atheism to the conventional statement that ‘one man alone’ shall interpret Christ’s teaching to us of the Roman following,—­and this man an old frail teacher, whose bodily and intellectual powers are, in the course of nature, steadily on the decline.  Why we ask, must an aged man be always elected to decide on the teaching of the ever-young and deathless Christ?—­to whom the burden of years was unknown, and whose immortal spirit, cased for a while in clay, saw ever the rapt vision of ‘old things being made new’?  In all other work but this of religious faith, men in the prime of life are selected to lead,—­men of energy, thought, action, and endeavour,—­but for the sublime and difficult task of lifting the struggling human soul out of low things to lofty, an old man, weak, and tottering on the verge of the grave, is set before us as our ‘infallible’ teacher!  There is something appalling in the fact, that look where we may, no profession holds out much chance of power