or experienced the truths you profess, but simply
because these dogmas are presented to you by the Church. If reason and
common-sense are gifts of God and intended for use, surely it is very
strange to silence them in your search for the supreme truth. Faith, of
course, has its place, but it must not be blind faith. Reason must test,
verify, and interpret, or faith is mere credulity.

"Consider, for example, the words of Christ, _This is My Body_. Now the
words as they stand may certainly be supposed to mean what you say they
mean; yet, interpreted by Reason, they cannot possibly mean anything of
the kind. Did not Christ Himself sit in bodily form at the table as He
spoke them? How then could He hold Himself in His hand? Did He not speak
in metaphors and images continually? Did He not call Himself _a Door and
a Vine_? Using Reason, then, to interpret these words, it is evident
that He meant no more than that He was instituting a memorial feast, in
which the bread should symbolize His Body and the wine His Blood. So too
with many other distinctively Catholic doctrines--with the Petrine
claims, with the authority 'to bind and loose,' and the rest. Catholic
belief on these points exhibits not faith properly so-called--that is,
Faith tested by Reason--but mere credulity. God gave us all Reason! Then
in His Name let us use it!"

(ii) From the other side comes precisely the opposite charge.

"You Catholics," cries the other critic, "are far too argumentative and
deductive and logical in your Faith. True Religion is a very simple
thing; it is the attitude of a child who trusts and does not question.
But with you Catholics Religion has degenerated into Theology. Jesus
Christ did not write a _Summa_; He made a few plain statements which
comprise, as they stand, the whole Christian Religion; they are full of
mystery, no doubt, but it is He who left them mysterious. Why, then,
should your theologians seek to penetrate into regions which He did not
reveal and to elaborate what He left unelaborated?

"Take, for example, Christ's words, _This is My Body_. Now of course
these words are mysterious, and if Christ had meant that they should be
otherwise, He would Himself have given the necessary comment upon them.
Yet He did not; He left them in an awful and deep simplicity into which
no human logic ought even to seek to penetrate. Yet see the vast and
complicated theology that the traditions have either piled upon them or
attempted t