tholicism is the more thorough. Protestantism is the more reasonable.
Protestantism adapts itself to modern civilisation. Catholicism expects
civilisation to adapt itself to it. Folk climb from the one big branch
to the other big branch, and think they have made a prodigious change,
when the main trunk is rotten beneath them, and both must in their
present forms be involved sooner or later in a common ruin. The movement
of human thought, though slow, is still in the direction of truth, and
the various religions which man sheds as he advances (each admirable in
its day) will serve, like buoys dropped down from a sailing vessel, to
give the rate and direction of his progress.

But how do I know what is truth, you ask? I don't. But I know
particularly well what isn't. And surely that is something to have
gained. It isn't true that the great central Mind that planned all
things is capable of jealousy or of revenge, or of cruelty or of
injustice. These are human attributes; and the book which ascribes
them to the Infinite must be human also. It isn't true that the laws of
Nature have been capriciously disturbed, that snakes have talked, that
women have been turned to salt, that rods have brought water out of
rocks. You must in honesty confess that if these things were presented
to us when we were, adults for the first time, we should smile at them.
It isn't true that the Fountain of all common sense should punish a race
for a venial offence committed by a person long since dead, and then
should add to the crass injustice by heaping the whole retribution upon
a single innocent scapegoat. Can you not see all the want of justice
and logic, to say nothing of the want of mercy, involved in such a
conception? Can you not see it, Bertie? How can you blind yourself to
it! Take your eyes away from the details for a moment, and look at this
root idea of the predominant Faith. Is the general conception of it
consistent with infinite wisdom and mercy? If not, what becomes of the
dogmas, the sacraments, the whole scheme which is founded upon this
sand-bank? Courage, my friend! At the right moment all will be laid
aside, as the man whose strength increases lays down the crutch which
has been a good friend to him in his weakness. But his changes won't be
over then. His hobble will become a walk, and his walk a run. There is
no finality--CAN be none since the question concerns the infinite. All
this, which appears too advanced to you to-day,