to live and to dwell within it”.  What is the consequence?  Let the late Cardinal Archbishop and the Bishops of England answer.  “Many Catholics,” they write in their joint pastoral, “are consequently in danger of forfeiting not only their faith, but even their independence, by taking for granted as venerable and true the halting and disputable judgment of some men of letters or of science which may represent no more than the wave of some popular feeling, or the views of some fashionable or dogmatising school.  The bold assertions of men of science are received with awe and bated breath, the criticisms of an intellectual group of savants are quoted as though they were rules for a holy life, while the mind of the Church and her guidance are barely spoken of with ordinary patience.”

In a world such as this, with the agents of evil ever active and threatening, with error strewn as thorns about our path at every step, and with polished and seductive voices whispering doubt and suggesting rebellion and disobedience to men, already too prone to disloyalty, and arguing as cunningly as Satan, of old, argued with Eve; in such a world, who, we may well ask, does not see the pressing need as well as the inestimable advantages and security afforded by a living, vigilant, responsible and supreme authority, where all who seek, may find an answer to their doubts, and a strength and a firm support in their weakness?

And as surely as the need exists, so surely has God’s watchful providence supplied it, in the person of the Supreme Pontiff, the venerable Vicar of Christ on earth.  He is authorised and commissioned by Christ Himself “to feed” with sound doctrine, both “the lambs and the sheep”; and faithfully has he discharged that duty.  “The Pope,” writes Cardinal Newman, “is no recluse, no solitary student, no dreamer about the past, no doter upon the dead and gone, no projector of the visionary.  He, for eighteen hundred years, has lived in the world; he has seen all fortunes, he has encountered all adversaries, he has shaped himself for all emergencies.  If ever there was a power on earth who had an eye for the times, who has confined himself to the practicable, and has been happy in his anticipations, whose words have been facts, and whose commands prophecies, such is he, in the history of ages, who sits, from generation to generation, in the chair of the Apostles, as the Vicar of Christ, and the Doctor of His Church.”

“These are not the words of rhetoric,” he continues, “but of history.  All who take part with the Apostle are on the winning side.  He has long since given warrants for the confidence which he claims.  From the first, he has looked through the wide world, of which he has the burden; and, according to the need of the day, and the inspirations of his Lord, he has set himself, now to one thing, now to another; but to all in season, and to nothing in vain....  Ah!  What grey hairs are on the head of Judah, whose youth is renewed like the eagle’s,