of others, they are at a disadvantage, at all events in England, where logic does not enter into the national religious system, and the mind is apt to resent conviction as if it were a kind of coercion.  There are a great number of such born Nonconformists in England, and when either the grace of Catholic education or of conversion has been granted to them, it is interesting to watch the efforts to subdue and attune themselves to submission and to faith.  Sometimes the Nonconformist temperament is the greatest of safeguards, where a Catholic child is obliged to stand alone amongst uncongenial surroundings, then it defends itself doggedly, splendidly, and comes out after years in a Protestant school quite untouched in its faith and much strengthened in militant Christianity.  These are cheerful instances of its development, and its advantages; they would suggest that some external opposition or friction is necessary for such temperaments that their fighting instinct may be directed against the common enemy, and not tend to arouse controversies and discussions in its own ranks or within itself.  In less happy cases the instinct of opposition is a cause of endless trouble, friction in family life, difficulty in working with others, “alarums, excursions” on all sides, and worse, the get attitude of distrust towards authority, which undermines the foundations of faith and prepares the mind to break away from control, to pass from instinctive opposition to antagonism, from antagonism to contempt, from contempt to rebellion and revolt.  Arrogance of mind, irreverence, self-idolatry, blindness, follow in their course, and the whole nature loses its balance and becomes through pride a pitiful wreck.

The assenting mind has its own possibilities for good and evil, more human than those of Nonconformity, for “pride was not made for men” (Ecclus. x 22), less liable to great catastrophes, and in general better adapted for all that belongs to the service of God and man.  It is a happy endowment, and the happiness of others is closely bound up with its own.  Again, its faults being more human are more easily corrected, and fortunately for the possessor, punish themselves more often.  This favours truthfulness in the mind and humility in the soul—­the spirit of the Confiteor.  Its dangers are those of too easy assent, of inordinate pursuit of particular good, of inconstancy and variability, of all the humanistic elements which lead back to paganism.  The history of the Renaissance in Southern Europe testifies to this, as it illustrates in other countries the development of the spirit of Nonconformity and revolt.  Calvinism and a whole group of Protestant schools of thought may stand as examples of the spirit of denial working itself out to its natural consequences; while the exaggerations of Italian humanism, frankly pagan, are fair illustrations of the spirit of assent carried beyond bounds.  And those centuries when the tide of life ran high for good or evil, furnish instances