If persecution brings with it graces of which peace is ignorant, it has also dangers that peace does not know. In the tumult and dust of the combat, the forms of objects get effaced or change; the mind becomes excited, and the flesh exasperated; and if one side or hemisphere of the truth be then discovered to us, it is much to be feared that the other is veiled. Given for a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men, but above all to our own selves, we shall perhaps have difficulty in guarding ourselves from pride.

Wonderful fact! We may be sure that those from whose mouths we most frequently hear the name of God, are, generally speaking, those who think least of the Supreme Being.

Do not be too hard upon the narrow man; he is narrow only through severity towards himself. Respect the motive while blaming the effects; prefer anything to indifference, and impute to the narrow but conscientious man all the affections that he has not, but would have did his conscience permit him, and will have so soon as he shall know them to be just and necessary. That moment has not yet come for him.

A Christian is a man who has wept and been consoled, who weeps still daily, but is daily comforted by his God. His happiness is not without tears; his memories keep their source open, and painful experiences often come to enlarge it. But his happiness is happiness for all that,- a profound

happiness, which entirely fills the soul; for it is composed of peace, hope, and love, and the holy tears of compunction fall on it like dew. If he wept not, he would require your pity. It is when that fountain dries up that true misfortune begins.

The truth, properly conceived of, ought to have one or other of two contrary effects: to plunge us into utter despair, or boundlessly to console us; to make us quite happy or quite miserable.

He who believes but in Jesus glorified, knows nothing; he who believes in Jesus humbled, annihilated, knows all.

Can there then be only one way of giving glory to the truth? Is the most direct in every way the best? And is not living speaking also?

I know not what insipid soul and factitious life are constantly threatening to take the place of our own life and soul. I know not what magic force makes us welcome as the spontaneous inspiration of our conscience, and defend with the warmth of conviction, systems and formulas which have sprung up externally to us from the conflict of ideas and the course of events. We observe, imitate, repeat, and we mistake this for experiencing.

THIRD SECTION.

HISTORICAL CHRISTIANITY.

CHAPTER I.

THE CHURCH.

I. ITS NATURE.

1. Importance of the Question.-Definition; Society and
Schools; the Parish.

THE question of the Church is that not of the day only, but of the age. We meet with it everywhere, and everywhere in the first class of those questions from the solution of which society expects its fate. The world, that has halted around this problem, will set out again on its march so soon as it is solved. Each great epoch has its own Gordian knot; this is ours. In default of a better method, the sword will be called into play; the knot will be cut, we would fain have untied it. It is to this that our efforts tend, others than we are ready to take up the sword.

"The form does not give the life." Absolutely, and as a general thesis, this is true: the form does not give the life. But besides the fact that the form is the fulcrum, the subject, and in a manner the theatre of the life, it is certain that some forms are

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less, and others more adapted to life's preservation and development. Monsters are short-lived; the excessive tenuity or excessive volume of any organ renders vital functions either difficult or precarious. In the organic world there is no exception to this law; there cannot be any in the moral world.

It is remarkable that the very advances the gospel makes, may, in the long run, threaten the Church; the fact is, that if they create outside of her a life, a movement, an activity that is not found within her, if everything there be monotonous and constrained, those things will inevitably be looked for where they may be found; the fact is, that they who desire to prevent the hive from swarming must allow the bees to make honey; if the expatriation of the Christian be deprecated, his metropolis must be made dearer and more attractive to him than any colony.

A Church is a society of believers; we cannot yield this point without falling into contradictions. A Church has only the consciousness of its nature and its reality in so far as it knows itself to be composed of believers.

By this word, Society-offensive to some, this is what we understand: Each Christian is directly taught of God; no one has dominion over his faith; he himself derives this faith from God's Word, and depends for the interpretation of that Word upon the Holy Spirit alone. The Church is a society; or, if it be a school, the schoolmaster is God himself.

We can only maintain in its purity, and rationally admit the notion of the Church as a school, by rejecting the idea of this school being the institution of the scholars. We must revert to a higher origin. We must admit a divine institution of the first preceptors, and next, an authentic and uninterrupted succession, in virtue of which the last of the teachers is equally authoritative as the first. Such is the Catholic system, or rather dogma, according to which the immediate word of God continues in the Church without interruption or diminution, the clergy being its organ, and pronouncing, either by the lips of their head, or by the decrees of their assemblies, what are the oracles of the Holy Spirit. Such is the Church viewed as a school. There is no society. here; but there is a community, formed by God himself, with reference to the interests of religion; maintained by him and governed by him, without active concurrence of its own. In such a system, it is the clergy who are called the Church; but a clergy receiving from God infallible instructions, to which the community can but submit, since this submission is of faith, forms part of the religion, sums it all up indeed, and constitutes Catholicism. There is a permanent miracle presupposed in a system like this.

The Church, in any other than the Catholic point of view, is necessarily a society. Once at least it was a society, and having been so once, it always is so. It always is so, unless indeed its chiefs have since

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