Australia is as truly in touch with the central authority at the Vatican, and as completely under its direction in matters of faith and morals, as the crowned heads of Spain or Austria, or as the Archbishops of Paris or Malines.  Certainly Digitus Dei est hic:  the finger of God is here.  The simple fact is, there is always something about the works of God which clearly differentiate them from the products of man, however close may be the mere external and surface resemblance.  A thousand artists may carve a thousand acorns, so cunningly coloured, and so admirably contrived as to be practically indistinguishable from the genuine fruit of the oak.  Each of these thousand artists may present me with his manufactured acorn, and may assure me of its genuineness.  And, alas!  I may be quite deceived and taken in; yes, but only for a time.  When I plant them in the soil, together with the genuine acorn, and give them time to develop, the fraud is detected, and the truth revealed.  For the real seed proves its worth.  How?  In the simplest way possible, that is to say, by actually doing what it was destined and created to do.  That is, by growing and developing into a majestic oak, while the false and human imitations fall to pieces, belie all one’s hopes, and are found to produce neither branch nor leaf nor fruit.

This is but an illustration of what may be observed equally in the spiritual order, although there it is attended by more disastrous consequences.  Thus we find hundreds of Churches proclaiming themselves to be foundations of God, which Time, the old Justice who tries all such offenders, soon proves, most unmistakably, to be nothing but the contrivances of man.  They may bear a certain external resemblance to the true Church, planted by the Divine Husbandman, but like the man-made acorns, they deceive all our expectations, and are wholly unable to redeem their promises, or to live up to their pretensions.

For, while one and all declare with their lips that they possess the truth as revealed by Christ, their glaring divisions, irreconcilable differences, and internal dissensions emphatically prove that the truth is not in them:  and that they have been built, not on the rock, but on the shifting sand, and are the erections, not of God, but of feeble, fickle men.

On the other hand, the Catholic Church, amid a thousand sects, resembles the genuine acorn among the thousand imitations.  Not only does she alone possess the whole truth; but she alone can stand up and actually prove this claim to the entire world, by pointing defiantly at her marvellous and miraculous unity—­a unity so conspicuous, and so striking, and so absolutely unique, that even the hostile and bigoted Protestant press can sometimes scarcely refrain from bearing an unwilling testimony to it.