the special claims of the Catholic Church, they must really, with the candid theist, tell very strongly in her favour.  For the theist, all theisms have a profound element of truth in them; and all alleged revelations will, in his eyes, be natural theisms, struggling to embody themselves in some authorised and authoritative form.  The Catholic Church, as we have seen, is a human organism, capable of receiving the Divine Spirit; and this is what all other religious bodies, in so far as they have claimed authority for their teaching, have consciously or unconsciously attempted to be likewise; only the Catholic Church represents success, where the others represent failure:  and thus these, from the Catholic stand-point, are abortive and incomplete Catholicisms.  The Bethesda of human faith is world-wide and as old as time; only in one particular spot an angel has come down and troubled it; and the waters have been circling there, thenceforth, in a healing vortex.  Such is the sort of claim that the Catholic Church makes for herself; and, if this be so, what she is, does not belie what she claims to be.  Indeed, the more we compare her with the other religions, her rivals, the more, even where she most resembles them, shall we see in her a something that marks her off from them.  The others are like vague and vain attempts at a forgotten tune; she is like the tune itself, which is recognised the instant it is heard, and which has been so near to us all the time, though so immeasurably far away from us.  The Catholic Church is the only dogmatic religion that has seen what dogmatism really implies, and what will, in the long run, be demanded of it, and she contains in herself all appliances for meeting these demands.  She alone has seen that if there is to be an infallible voice in the world, this voice must be a living one, as capable of speaking now as it ever was in the past; and that as the world’s capacities for knowledge grow, the teacher must be always able to unfold to it a fuller teaching.  The Catholic Church is the only historical religion that can conceivably thus adapt itself to the wants of the present day, without virtually ceasing to be itself.  It is the only religion that can keep its identity without losing its life, and keep its life without losing its identity; that can enlarge its teachings without changing them; that can be always the same, and yet be always developing.

All this, of course, does not prove that Catholicism is the truth; but it will show the theist that, for all that the modern world can tell him, it may be.  And thus much at least will by-and-by come to be recognised generally.  Opinion, that has been clarified on so many subjects, cannot remain forever turbid here.  A change must come, and a change can only be for the better.  At present the so-called leaders of enlightened and liberal thought are in this matter, so far as fairness and insight go, on a level with the wives and mothers of our small provincial shopkeepers, or the beadle or churchwarden of a country parish.  But prejudice, even when so virulent and so dogged as this, will lift and disappear some day like a London fog; and then the lineaments of the question will confront us clearly—­the question:  but who shall decide the answer?