and self still sway men’s hearts.  The spirit of independence and self-assertion and egotism, in spite of all efforts at repression, continue to stalk abroad.  And human nature, even to-day, is almost as impatient of restraint, and as unwilling to bear the yoke of obedience, as in the time when Gregory resisted Henry of Germany, or when Pius VII. excommunicated Napoleon.  If, even in the Apostolic age, when the number of the faithful was small and concentrated, there were, nevertheless, men of unsound views—­“wolves in sheep’s clothing”—­amongst the flock of Christ, how much more likely is this to be the case now.  If the Apostle St. Paul felt called upon to warn his own beloved disciples against those “who would not endure sound doctrine,” and who “heaped to themselves teachers, having itching ears,” and who even “closed their ears to the truth, in order to listen to fables” (2 Tim. iv. 1-5), surely we may reasonably expect to find, even in our own generation, many who have fallen, or who are in danger of falling under the pernicious influence of false teachers, and who are being seduced and led astray by the plausible, but utterly fallacious, reasoning of proud and worldly spirits.  It would be easy to name several, but they are too well known already to need further advertising here.

Then, she has adversaries without, as well as within.  For, though the Church is not of the world, she is in the world.  Which is only another way of saying that she is surrounded continually and on all sides by powerful, subtle, and unscrupulous foes.  “The world is the enemy of God,” and therefore of His Church.  If its votaries cannot destroy her, nor put an end to her charmed life, they hope, at least, to defame her character and to blacken her reputation.  They seize every opportunity to misrepresent her doctrine, to travesty her history, and to denounce her as retrograde, old fashioned, and out of date.  And, what makes matters worse, the falsest and most mischievous allegations are often accompanied by professions of friendship and consideration, and set forth in learned treatises, with an elegance of language and an elevation of style calculated to deceive the simple and to misguide the unwary.  It is Father W. Faber who remarks that, “there is not a new philosophy nor a freshly named science but what deems, in the ignorance of its raw beginnings, that it will either explode the Church as false or set her aside as doting” (Bl.  Sac.  Prologue).  Indeed the world is always striving to withdraw men and women from their allegiance to the Church, through appeals to its superior judgment and more enlightened experience; and philosophy and history and even theology are all pressed into the service, and falsified and misrepresented in such a manner as to give colour to its complaints and accusations against the Bride of Christ, who, it is seriously urged, “should make concessions and compromises with the modern world, in order to purchase the right