an a strength, an enemy
rather than a friend.

(ii) But if, on the one side, the gentleness and non-resistance
inculcated by Christianity form the material of one charge against the
Church, on the other side, no less, she is blamed for her violence and
intransigeance. Catholics are not yielding enough, we are told, to be
true followers of the meek Prophet of Galilee, not gentle enough to
inherit the blessing which He pronounced. On the contrary there are no
people so tenacious, so obstinate, and even so violent as these
professed disciples of Jesus Christ. See the way, for example, in which
they cling to and insist upon their rights; the obstacles they raise,
for example, to reasonable national schemes of education or to a
sensible system in the divorce courts. And above all, consider their
appalling and brutal violence as exhibited in such institutions as that
of the Index and Excommunication, the fierceness with which they insist
upon absolute and detailed obedience to authority, the ruthlessness with
which they cast out from their company those who will not pronounce
their shibboleths. It is true that in these days they can only enforce
their claims by spiritual threatenings and penalties, but history shows
us that they would do more if they could. The story of the racks and the
fires of the Inquisition shows plainly enough that the Church once used,
and therefore, presumably, would use again if she could, carnal weapons
in her spiritual warfare. Can anything be more unlike the gentle Spirit
of Him Who, _when He was reviled, reviled not again;_ of Him Who bade
men to _learn of Him, for He was meek and lowly of heart_, and so _find
rest to their souls?_

Here, then, is the Paradox, and here are two characteristics of the
Catholic Church: that she is at once too meek and too self-assertive,
too gentle and too violent. It is a paradox exactly echoed by our Divine
Lord Himself, Who in the Upper Chamber bade His disciples who _had no
sword_ to _sell their cloaks and buy them_, and Who yet, in the garden
of Gethsemane, commanded the one disciple who had taken Him at His word
to _put up the sword into its sheath_, telling him that _they who took
the sword should perish by it_. It is echoed yet again in His action,
first in taking the scourge into His own Hand, in the temple courts, and
then in baring His shoulders to that same scourge in the hands of
others. How, then, is this Paradox to be reconciled?

II. The Church, l