tism appears to such a world as
extravagant as her Contemplation, her passion for men as unreasonable as
her passion for God, when that world sees her bring herself from her
cloisters and her secret places to proclaim as with a trumpet those
demands of God which He has made known, those Laws which He has
promulgated, and those rewards which He has promised? For how can she do
otherwise who has looked on the all-glorious Face of God and then on the
vacant and complacent faces of men--she who knows God's infinite
capacity for satisfying men and men's all but infinite incapacity for
seeking God--when she sees some poor soul shutting herself up indeed
within the deadly and chilly walls of her own "temperament" and
"individual point of view," when earth and heaven and the Lord of them
both is waiting for her outside?

The Church, then, is too much interested in men and too much absorbed in
God. Of course she is too much interested and too much absorbed, for she
alone knows the value and capacity of both; she who is herself both
Divine and Human. For Religion, to her, is not an elegant accomplishment
or a graceful philosophy or a pleasing scheme of conjectures. It is the
fiery bond between God and man, neither of whom can be satisfied
without the other, the One in virtue of His Love and the other in virtue
of his createdness. She alone, then, understands and reconciles the
tremendous Paradox of the Law that is Old as well as New. _Thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart ... and thy neighbour as
thyself _.

VI

FAITH AND REASON

_Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall
not enter into it_.--MARK X. 15.

_Some things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and the unstable
wrest, as also the other Scriptures, to their own perdition_.--
II PET. III. 16.

There are two great gifts, or faculties, by which men attain to truth:
faith and reason. From these two sides, therefore, come two more
assaults upon the Catholic position, a position which itself faces in
both these directions. On the one side we are told that we believe too
simply, on the other that we do not believe simply enough; on the one
side that we reason too little, on the other that we do not reason
enough. Let us set out these attacks in order.

I. (i) "You Catholics," says one critic, "are far too credulous in
matters of religion. You believe, not as reasonable men believe, because
you have verified